One of Amos’ new efforts at DiscoverMagazine.com is a new “journalistic mashup” blog call 80beats, which reports on scientific topics of popular interest. Here’s a screen snip of the text from an entry about new solar panels that use internal reflection to collect sunlight:

As you can see, the body of the post is made up of quotes from other news sources, colored in blue. This is a format that I really like; mashed up news from many sources. Some blogs like this are even explicit about reporting on biases; the sources themselves are sometimes a part of the story.

What 80beats is doing well is to start developing a UI around the mashup text, allowing a very natural flow of the prose. Using blue text and the occasional editorial brackets means the reader can easily ignore the sources completely and read the post as an uninterrupted piece of content. The references are there, though, for anyone who desires more context.

Wordle is a Java Applet for creating word clouds, such as the tag cloud here on mindtangle.net. However, the words can be set to orient themselves every which way, nest, etc. I’ve seen this on a couple blogs, so I decided to make my own. Here’s my delicious word cloud, artfully arranged:

AB noticed that on the Chinese version of Google Finance, red and green have reversed meanings: red for good and green for bad:

I’ve exaggerated the red because it was hard for my color-differently-abled eyes to see.

Red is certainly a lucky color in China, traditionally. I wonder if green has any cultural meanings. AB did note (helpfully) that “in China, ‘green hat’ often refers to a man whose wife is cheating on him. In the unlikely event of you wanting to give your Chinese friend a hat, steer clear of green.”

This is cool: Walk-Score looks up common businesses nearby, finds out how far you’d need to walk to get to them, and compiles a “walk score” to tell you how walkable your neighborhood is. Genius use of the Google Maps APIs!

Here’s an example of an intersection near where I live:

Below are two posters up on the wall at my office, both extremely dense visualizations produced by Stanford’s Global Climate & Energy Project. I wanted find PDFs of these, but Google didn’t turn them up. So, I took pictures with my phone and posted them here. Better than nothing, though the second diagram (the more interesting one, IMHO) is almost illegible.

Click on each thumbnail to see the full image.

Wow. John just sent me a link to Live Ink, a company that has cool text-formatting software. It’s analogous to code formatting, but for written language syntax.

It looked gimmicky, at first, but then I started trying out the samples on the site. After a few pages, it started to click. I would read phrases of each sentence as a unit. Because the text is formatted somewhat like the outline of the parts of a single sentence, I’m able to quickly scan and jump to relevant clauses. The indentation also serves to bring several clauses into the eye’s fovea in parallel. In this way, it seems to gain some of the advantages of serial reading interfaces (i.e. eye movement over a small area), while still allowing for page scanning and variable-rate reading.

Too bad it’s a proprietary product, and too bad it’s Windows/IE-only. Because of this, I’m pretty sure it will never see mainstream development or use, unless the company somehow does extremely well with its software boxen business model (unlikely) or it goes under and opens the source.

The product itself seems to work as a hosted service. You download a thin client that sends clipboard text to a server to be parsed and formatted, and then the client displays the result. If they were smart, they would make this a web service. There’s an adoption curve that Live Ink has to overcome, and letting lots of uses proliferate (Greasemonkey scripts! Wordpress plugins! A new version of Wikipedia!) would build a user base that would actually buy the product, or demand it from content providers.

(via John, who got this from Slashdot)