Had a little fun with Wordle today, a java applet that builds a word map out of a chunk of text or someone's del.icio.us tags. I used the seedWatcher blogroll and post categories to whip this one up (font is called Gnuolane Free):
It's a nifty little Java applet, outsourcing the CPU-intensive work to your local machine, rather than bog down the server of what is essentially a side project of IBM Research developer Jonathan Feinberg. In fact, though it's free to use and the images are yours to do whatever with, the code isn't open source and is actually owned by IBM.
I'm not sure what your "web 2.0" definition is. I thought it had to do with user-created content.
Posted by: Jonathan Feinberg | June 30, 2008 at 05:16 AM
Jonathan, thanks for the comment. Fair point - poorly worded on my end. I meant to imply it isn't a server-side web app like the bulk of this new wave of web tools. I edited the post above to correct it.
Thanks, and great work with Wordle.
Marc
Posted by: Marc Hustvedt | June 30, 2008 at 10:06 AM
There's a very important server-side component to Wordle. That's where saved Wordles go, and it's how the home page is populated. Thumbnails are served up dynamically to blog posts, etc.
Wordle is implemented in Python on Google's "App Engine".
Posted by: Jonathan Feinberg | June 30, 2008 at 10:35 AM