About Me

Hi. I'm John Eckman.

John Eckman

I'm a Sr. Director at Optaros, a professional services firm offering strategy, design, development, and consulting services to enterprises interested in leveraging free and open source software.

More about me

About Open Parenthesis

Contact Me

Optaros

Travel

 

Upcoming Conferences

Web 2.0 Kongress, Hamburg

Web Content 2009

SXSW Interactive, 2009

My Tweets
  • @jennbarnett I've actually seen travelers arguing with security about wanting to bring their sno-globes. They lose, every time. 21 hrs ago
  • or maybe I'm just following too many of thw wrong people - I have not bee cultivating (or weeding) my twitter garden enough . . . 1 day ago
  • feels like it's become just another channel for spam and self-promotion. is it just the arrival of the mainstream? like when aol hit usenet? 1 day ago
  • Twitter's shine is officially gone for me. maybe I'm just tired, or its the global economic collapse, bit I'm finding it hard to tweet. 1 day ago
  • Thinking of writing a song about conference rooms and how much alike they all are. Sort of like "homeward bound" by S&G but not as good 1 day ago
  • More updates...

Posting tweet...

Powered by Twitter Tools.

Optaros Blogs
Affiliations

[FSF Associate Member]

Creative Commons
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
June 16, 2008

Prettier Tag Coulds with Wordle

Tagged with: , , , , , , — John @ 2:06 pm

(Via Max Kiesler)

Wordle is a java applet, created by Jonathan Feinberg, which creates aesthetically pleasing tag clouds from text you enter, offering you rough control over layout, font, and colors.

Here’s one I created based on the current content of this blog (click on it to view full size):

Wordle Tag Cloud of this Blog

Note that Enterprise comes out heavy - I assume that has to do with the Enterprise 2.0 conference being the title of many recent posts.

May 21, 2008

Twitter Visualization - Twistori

I blogged a while back about We Feel Fine, a visualization of data from the internet cloud mapped to feelings by Jonathan Harris.

Now Thomas Fuchs and Amy Hoy have brought a similar visualization approach to Twitter with Twistori (click for full sized image):

Twitter Visualization via Twistori

It’s wonderful - simple, clear, lightweight, easy to watch, and elegant. I’d love it if it were possible to create your own twistori terms - maybe they’ll release the code?

Read more about it on Amy’s Blog: love & hate: from knuckle tattoos to the internet’s emotional pulse with Twistori

March 2, 2008

IA Japan Web Trend Map 2008

Tagged with: , , , , , , — John @ 10:54 am

Via Bill Ives’ Portals and KM Blog I discovered that the folks at Information Architects Japan have released (in beta, naturally) the 2008 version of their highly popular Web Trends Map : Web Trends Map Beta 2008

Trend Map 2008

Unfortunately for me the download link is having issues - resulting in a corrupted PDF. But the interactive, clickable online version is working fine.

There are also a couple of posts describing the thought process and rationale behind the map:

The first of which includes this quick dig at Facebook’s expense:

Facebook has moved to Nippori because, from a broader perspective, Nippori is boring. But it’s still an important station (Nippori is a hub for Narita, Tokyo’s international airport).

Nice.