Tuesday, November 29. 2011
Visualizing 3D Printing and Additive Fabrication on Twitter
For those of us more right-brained than left, pictures so often seem better than words for getting points across. How then can we make sense of something that is primarily words, like Twitter?
Summarizing keywords in a 'word cloud' and indicating their importance with font size, weight and maybe color is one way to do it. Word clouds have become especially popular in the last ten years as we've moved on to Web 2.0 and a number of tools exist for creating them. One particularly cool tool is Infomous by Icosystem. Anyone can set up a free account and create embeddable word clouds using their patented text visualization algorithm. After choosing your keywords you then select from a variety of sources such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs etc.. Finally, you can copy code for your new word cloud and embed on your own page.
But a picture is worth a thousand words so check check out the current Twitter conversations for '3d printing' and 'additive fabrication':
