TAToo is an embeddable text analysis widget which allows basic page analytics to be easily integrated alongside the text that it analyzes.

The tool, spawned from the mind of Geoffrey Rockwell and begun as a side project during my work with him, is APACHE licensed and includes a basic wordpress plugin.

Feature requests and bug reports are appreciated.

Here’s a chart of my past year in music listening habits. Note the explosion in late July when I started subscribing to Rdio.

Generated by Lastgraph, recoloured in Illustrator.

I’m always impressed with the cleverness of hacks that repurpose a tool for a use completely foreign to its original function. Things like fluffing your pillows with tennis balls in the dryer or keeping moisture from brown sugar by adding grains of rice. One particularly neat area of late is in mobile devices. With smartphones piling on all sorts of trinkets and sensors, people are finding subversive uses for them. Here’s a few that I’ve been amused and impressed by:

Instant Heart Rate (Android): We can all recognize the bright red orb of a finger placed over a camera lens. This app uses that for practical purposes: a user holds their finger over the lens and it tracks their heart rate through changes in color. Neat!

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A few days ago, I successfully defending my MA thesis on crowd motivation. As I polish up a final copy for print, here is my draft. Details forthcoming.

Why Bother? Examining the Motivations of Users in Large-Scale Crowd-Powered Online Initiatives

As this is not the final copy, please do not distribute it. Rather, link back to this page, so that I can provide the final when available.

A reworking of Mack D. Male’s graphic.

Recently I’ve been participated in Empire Avenue, an online person stock exchange, where users buy shares in each other.

One feature that has caused me much amusement is the advertising. Using the game’s virtual money, one can buy an ad and make the case for their stock. I’d previously concentrated more on my investments rather than my own shares, but yesterday I decided to have some fun with some increasingly odd ads. Here are the results of my little experiment.

My ticker, by the way, is PORG.

I began by stating facts. I’d jumped over the weekend and was still going up.

From there, I’m moved to the Head-On approach of repeating a barely coherent statement a couple times.

Next, I decided to move into chastising users, like online “entrepreneurs” do. Nothings says ‘trust me’ like ‘you’re an idiot for not trusting me’. I approached this with increasingly nonsensical metaphor (What does “breeze of regret even mean, and is it even bad? It was originally “gentle breeze”, but I figured that was too much.)

Note that I had a typo (though I like to imagine it being said with Mario’s faux Italian accent – “THAT’S A-the odor..”), so for the the sake of keeping results fair I reposted it.

Next, I moved into rewriting history.

Taking a slight detour in tone, this one references the other ads. It doesn’t make sense if mine is at the top, but if it’s under another ad it may offer an amusing juxtaposition.

Next, suggestions of nefarious dealings.

Some more of the Head-On approach.

And as a final experiment, a comparison between yelling and speaking, with the same statement punctuated differently.

So, how did it turn out? Here are the results:

1 click per 1200 views! Success! Oddly enough, my share prices jumped by another 2 credits overnight, though that was based more on my portfolio.

As impressive as the results are, it did fare worse than my other ad, which gave me 1 per 167 views.

Note: let me know if you want an invite to the game.