Kaleidoscopes in CoverPop

Author: Laura Klemme

CoverPop - Kaleidoscope
http://www.coverpop.com/pop/mini_kaleids/

CoverPop is another Flickr tool by Jim Bumgardner, aka krazydad.com.

Programmer: Jim Bumgardner
Brief Bio: Jim is a Flickr guru. He coauthored the book, Flickr Hacks: Tips & Tools for Sharing Photos Online (Hacks) for O'Reilly. He founded the Flickr Hacks group and has authored other Flickr utilities.

Similar to Jim's Colr Pickr, CoverPop blends a collage of individual Flickr photos based on color and intensity.

CoverPop has a whole selection of views, but in this post, we are only looking at the Kaleidoscope view. The kaleidoscope collage as shown (above), uses another one of Jim's utilities that creates a kaleidoscope out of ordinary photos.

The CoverPop kaleidoscope collage, is a collection of mini kaleidoscopes that are saved in Flickr.

Each mini kaleidoscope is a different picture. Clicking on one of them will open up a window in Flickr with a full view of a kaleidoscope. One of these many breathtaking kaleidoscopes is shown (left).

Photo, with permission, by: AlphenaMi.

AlphenaMi created this kaleidoscope from an ordinary photo with another tool from Jim.

The original photo of a box of colored pens used in this kaleidoscope is shown (right). Photos with colorful patterns or repeated shapes are great choices for use in kaleidoscopes.

Photo, with permission, by: ciokkolata

Creating Word Clouds

Wordle Word Clouds

http://www.wordle.net/

Author: Laura Klemme

Wordle is a site for creating word clouds of text that you select. Word clouds give a view of the text that visually displays words in a larger size the more frequently they appear. Either cut and paste your text into a window or point to a url; Wordle does the rest.

Wordle of Barrack Obama's Victory Speech
November 4, 2008.
(Transcript source: npr.org; Word cloud: wordle.net)




A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words
Barrak Obama's victory speech is shown above. At a glance, you can see the dominate message of his speech by the size of the words. This is certainly a historic moment in US history as the first African-American President Elect speaks to the nation. The full transcript does not give you the visual message that a word cloud can provide, true to the saying, 'A picture is worth a thousand words.'

Artistic?
Wordle is not your ordinary word cloud generator. It offers a creative way of displaying your word clouds. Wordle lets you modify your clouds with different controls over the fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The gallery has a few colorful displays of Obama's victory speech submitted by various contributors. Here are a few: Obama1 and Obama2.

Wordle of John McCain's Consession Speech
November 4, 2008.
(Word cloud: wordle.net)



The gallery also posts, John McCain's gracious concession speech, shown above. Again, the message speaks through this visual representation.

Creative Commons License
The images you create with Wordle are part of the Creative Commons license. You can create a gallery and share them, view other Wordles, link to them on blogs or web pages or print them out.