website
The great pleasure of free toys.
Excuse my enthusiasm; it is Friday, I am seeing a Broadway show this weekend and I did have a very productive week. Among other projects, I found myself doing manual content analysis of loads of text from survey responses. It's a trusty, reliable and decently accurate way to characterize the tenor of a large number of responses to open-ended survey questions. But I found myself wishing for a way to illustrate the truism that "A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words." So I went searching for and found a terrific, free (how do they do that?) online tool for generating so-called "word clouds," www.wordle.net/create. Just "paste in a bunch of text," the location of an RSS feed or a del.icio.us user name and generate a beautiful cloud of words. You can manipulate the content, colors, typefaces and layouts. When you're happy with the result, save it to an online gallery, print to a pdf or grab it with a screenshot. Here's a word cloud I generated for the contents of my blog:
"David is a creative, out-of-the-box thinker who brings extensive experience to his consulting assignments. He helps drive to the heart of the issue and illuminate solutions and new approaches. He is highly sought after for his advice and sound business thinking."
John Lines, Director, Community Relations, Lancaster General Health
John Lines recommends David Kirk
