A friend who tends to do very interesting (and often confidential) research about media just sent me this lovely diagram. Of what, you ask? Your guess is as good as mine.

Said friend writes: “That’s a charmingly normal distribution… I love it when, every now and then, data turns out exactly like you want it to… I actually know what’s going on in the data, and what X and Y represent… I just can’t talk about it.”

I’m intrigued.

Amaztype uses the amazon.com API to pull search results for a given keyword, then returns results in the shape of the search term. My name returns a lot of different editions of Julie of the Wolves.

(Another great find from Kristin.)

Wordle has been making the rounds lately but I’ve just gotten in to mess around with it — and it’s fabulous.

Here is a Wordle rendering of all of my del.icio.us tags:

Sure, it’s just a tag cloud. But, because the final layout is so well done and the creation interface is so thoughtfully put together, the data can be manipulated and understood in a way that wouldn’t be possible with traditional tag clouds.

One of the highlights of LifeCamp was the discussion about theme words and what our theme word for 2008 would be. (Mine was “create.”) Chris Messina posted his to twitter, and thus a meme was born. See Chris’s recounting: Kicking off 2008 with a themeword

I wondered if there were any interesting patterns in the #themewords, so did a quick tweetscan search for themeword hashtags, scraped the data, and dumped it into Excel (with some nominal de-duping). I noticed that there were only a few words that were used by multiple people, but that the overall tone was amazingly positive.

I thought this would look interesting as a tag cloud (an overused visualization technique, yes, but still sometimes useful) so looked for and found a nice way to create an on-the-fly tag cloud at tagcrowd.com. The tagcrowd CSS got mangled by the WordPress template CSS, so I did a screen capture and posted the image to flickr.

Beautiful, eh? Here’s to a happy 2008!

Stephin Merritt of Magnetic Fields fame created and recorded a song in two days at an NPR studio, and the song-crafting process is beautifully captured on film.

I found it interesting to watch how as the song developed its shape the tools that Merritt and the sound engineer use become more and more complex. Paper sketches are followed by the piano, then multiple analog instruments, to synthesizer, and finally to mixing and visualizing equipment.

The finished song is gorgeous.