The Real McCrea

What a cool little app I encountered today, thanks to somebody’s microblog post that I bumped into on some aggregator or another! It’s Wordle, and it takes the concept of “tag cloud” and applies it to any block of text or any website. But the real beauty is in the design of how the “word cloud” is rendered. Here are three different designs that got generated automatically from the last 1,000 words on this blog (and in one case, with a bit of tweaking by me through Wordle’s slick UI). Great stuff.

Let me know in the comments if you like one of these more than another. Or feel free to post a link to a version you do by plugging in the URL of this blog into Wordle.

This is turning out to be an historic week for the opening up of the Social Web. As it it weren’t enough to have MySpace indicating that they’re going to become an OpenID provider and Facebook unveiling some of the details of their ambitious Connect initiative at F8, now we have David Recordon announcing the formation of the Open Web Foundation at OSCON!

This collection of individuals (full disclosure: I am one of them), is taking on a very important mission: creating a vehicle to nurture the development of open specs. Why is that important and urgent? Well, every grass roots effort, whether OpenID, OAuth, or something yet to be dreamt up, needs to work through a whole lot of issues to go from great idea to finalized spec that companies large and small feel comfortable implementing. In particular, large companies want to make sure that they can adopt these building blocks without fear of being sued for infringing on somebody’s intellectual property rights. Absent the creation of this new organization, we were likely to see each new effort potentially creating yet-another-foundation to tackle what is essentially a common set of requirements.

The list of individuals involved includes key people from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, MySpace, Plaxo, SixApart, Vidoop, and others, a good sign of the broad support this initiative launches with. (Although it should be noted that the people are joining as individuals, not as official representative of their employers. Separately, companies can become sponsors.) I hope that this will mean more open spec building blocks sooner. Go, Open Web Foundation, go!

Other posts include:

David Recordon
Scott Kveton
ReaWriteWeb
TechCrunch

Great news today, as reported on TechCrunch by Michael Arrington, with Twitter sharing the data love with recently launched Gnip. Until now, there had been a lot of speculation about whether Twitter might be choosing a less open path, so this is not only great news in the narrow (for Gnip and its consumer sites, like Plaxo), but as a probable sign of Twitter’s strategy going forward, this is huge.

For those who haven’t followed this closely, Gnip is a new service that is helping with a key scalability challenge at the core of the emerging Social Web. In a world in which many different services are aggregating data feeds, the burden is rising rapidly on sites like Twitter, who must respond to ever more “Do you have any updates?” requests. Gnip flips the model, and pushes updates to those aggregators, offloading the burden from Twitter, Flickr, and many more to come.

We discussed Gnip in detail on Episode 1 of The Social Web TV, “Time to Get Pushy“. If you want to learn more, check it out.

I also recommend Dave Winer’s piece on this. He’s a key voice in this conversation. And props to Nic Cubrilovic of TechCrunchIT, who along with Steve Gillmor, has been vocally pushing for Twitter to take this move.

And for more background on why Gnip is Gnip, I did a post recently on the origin of their name.

Episode 1 was not so big a disaster to have cancelled the series, so, yes, we returned to the studio yesterday to show the second show. It’s up over at the TheSocialWeb.tv. We try to put the Meebo announcement into a broader perspective, and set the stage for a blockbuster week about to hit the Social Web.