Life in a Single Word

The Internet has enabled us to reach out further than we have been able to do so in the past. Now, we are able to get news from someone on the front line via a cell phone and a connection to a social site. Via those same social sites and the many blogs, we can see trends of the masses and thoughts of the individual. As well, instead of a quick conversation in passing and not know why a friend made a reference they did, we are now able to see how thoughts are formed and the influences simple words have on the outcome of our journeys.

Chris Harrison has taken information available from many sources, not the least all the data Google collects and has build a series of graphics showing the path in single words between two opposite words. I would encourage you to take the time to visit the site to understand the full scope of the collection and analyzing of the words. To give you a quick idea that the reporting of the data was no easy task:

“To better achieve a even distribution, I normalized the frequencies of bigrams based on total primary term frequency. So, for example, in the case of war vs. peace, there are 81,839,381 bigrams starting with war and 31,263,375 bigrams starting with peace. If I render the spectrum without normalization, it ends up lopsided toward war (since the usage totals are so much higher). To compensate, I scale down all of war’s bigrams so that the overall frequencies are even.“

The original project was called Word Spectrum, here is a low resolution example of one of the many graphics available. Each graphic on Chris’s site are done as a high def PDF so you can download and examine at your leisure.

As the process continues, Chris rethought the layout of the words and the path of single words leading from one end of a though to the opposite. These are called Word Associations. Again, available to view online or download as PDFs.

To keep my day going on track, I track work and progress in as simple form as possible. There are many tools available to link work together with other work so people can see how efforts effect other parts of a project. ToDo lists work great.

Before we get to a check list of what the day holds, and even before anyone works on a project plan – we map out what we are trying to get done and the many parts of what will make our finished deliverable a success.

A great tool to do this is MindMaps. For anyone who is not familiar with MindMaps, think of it as a core deliverable with all of the parts that make it possible spidering out from the center. There are thousands of books on the subject and many software titles available to help. A whiteboard is all you really need to set one up with a group, but software is nice if you need to share or change later.

If you look around on the Internet for MindMapping posts, you will find that people can really get into the process. They put descriptions on each of the spider legs and all kinds of fun drawings. For us, here, let’s keep it very simple and explore what you can say with just one word.

From MindTools:

Mind Maps are more compact than conventional notes, often taking up one side of paper. This helps you to make associations easily. And if you find out more information after you have drawn the main Mind Map, then you can easily add it in.

Mind Maps are also useful for:

* Summarizing information.
* Consolidating information from different research sources.
* Thinking through complex problems.
* Presenting information in a format that shows the overall structure of your subject.

A couple of the better known MindMapping software solutions are: www.thinkbuzan.com and www.mindjet.com/ – they both offer all kinds of videos and instructions.

Information Tamers has a very nice article taking your through the process of simple to very detailed. Not being wrapped around a particular software, the post is about the how and why for using MindMaps.

Since, so many great ideas start when your not at your desktop or in front of a whiteboard, there are a couple nice apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch. There are actually about a dozen apps, but these two are ones I actually use because they make it easy to share via a free box.net account (you can also upload to your desktop via your wireless network or email). The outputs can be an image or PDF if you just want to show someone your ideas, or they can be imported into your desktop MindMapping app.

The smaller screens force me to keep the lines to one word. Let’s see if I can stick to that when using the apps on a iPad when it comes out.

iThoughts

iBlueSky

There are many ‘word of the day’ sites and services available to us on the Web. Some try to teach us big words, others are ‘interesting’ words and there are also ones that try to teach us a new language.

One site I hit all the time for fun is Learn Something Everyday. In an attempt to keep their fun facts short, they wrap it with a touch of a hand drawing that drives the point home. It is a good example of keeping things simple and one groups attempt to say more with fewer words. Not often a single word, but they get it down to a very few.

“All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.”

Wordnik is built on the theory that people learn words best by seeing them in context. The site has more than 4 billion words of text (web pages, books, magazines, newspapers, etc.) and have mined so that you can find example sentences for any word you’re interested in. Be forewarned, in an attempt to show you info on any word, they show you whatever they have found, for any word you look up.

At Wordnik, you get:

• Real example sentences to show words in context
• Meaningful information about your word’s frequency and use patterns
• Related words—not just synonyms and antonyms, but words that behave in similar ways

I know I’m not the only one, but it seems like it at times. I’m thinking of the perfect word to get my point across, only to find that what I thought it meant isn’t exactly right. Or, more often, spell checker changes a word spelling that sounds the same but now changes the meaning of what I just wrote.

Precede to come before
Proceed to go forward

Historic means an important event.
Historical means something that happened in the past.

A year ago, I found a iPhone (and Touch) application called WordPal that has a list of words that have multiple meanings depending on how you spell them, even though the different spellings sound the same. It was 99 cents so I grabbed it to have it handy when something just doesn’t look right. You can see WordPal in the iTunes App Store here…

If your online with your computer, you can always visit a variety of Web sites that have many words as well… and Free is a even better price! A couple of these sites are CopyBlogger (List of 27 Misused Words) and Richmond Education (Commonly Confused Words). Both handy to look over when online – while not ‘searchable’ they are fun and informative.

Helvetica (Originally called Die Neue Haas Grotesk) was developed in 1957 by Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann at the Haas’sche Schriftgiesserei. It is so old, so yesterday, we almost always use some other font when creating a document. Not because the lettering is a bad looking font. When asking coworkers, it seems that the reason it isn’t use is because it’s the “default”.

Lucky for us, not everyone feels that way. When searching for examples of Helvetica being used, a article was found that covered 40 main line companies logos that use this as the base font. Here are just a few, to see the whole list takea look at the article over at Web Design Depot.

A popular method to show a group of words and their quantity of occurances is in a ‘Cloud’. Many times you will see a blog that has a column box of words that are sized by how many times that word appears in a article within the pages of that blog.

A Cloud can be helpful when watching trends and you do not have time to so a pull of data and compare that in a spreadsheet. Some more artistic Clouds have words floating about and changing sizes as quantities change. This is fun to watch but not very useful if your attempting to do something with the data.

Here is a Cloud that is pointed at Twitter. Where instead of showing every word, it shows 200 matching words in tweets based on a base word you enter. You can play with it at the developers, Jeff Clark created this on Neoformix.

We are ‘almost’ ready…