I'm a sucker for purdy things...

http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/app

You can thank my Morocco connections for this one. It’s a tool that is designed to take data sets that you provide and turn them into a variety of graphical representations.

Here is Obama’s speech at the DNC, turned into a word tree with McCain as the roots. http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/app

I’m still wrapping my head around what it all means, but I do know that it at least looks cool and I’m a sucker for that.

I can see this tool making a cool graph for a client that has plenty of data to work with… say Coinstar or HPWatch? Once again, I don’t know how but I do know that it would look cool.

Spread the Truth - Political Style

The Barack Obama capmpaign just started a new Web site called Fight the Smears. The purpose is to defend head on any smear attacks that come his way. Usually this is done in one way or another through the main campaign Web site but this one invites and makes it easy for people to spread the word to others. It will be interesting to see how this evolves as the campaign progresses. It will also be interesting to see if the media uses the site when reporting stories about Obama. Sometimes the truth can't always be explained in soundbytes. And sometimes the truth is a matter of perspective. And even sometimes the truth is not popular. Especially in politics. Let's see how this is used.