ResearchBuzz

Fun color tools! Ever seen a picture from which you wanted to extract the colors? There’s a nifty tool for doing so at http://www.pic2color.com/ .

Is very simple. Go to the site and enter the URL of an image. (You can also click on the Flickr logo and get a random picture from Flickr.) To test the site I went to Dooce.com and got a picture of her dog, Chuck, with a Dora the Explorer balanced on his head. (At http://www.dooce.com/photos/dailyphoto/02_16_2007.jpg if you want.)

After a few moments (it’s a bit of a slow loader) I got a page with a smaller version of the picture and a color palette underneath. Click on a color for the color’s hex value. Clicking on the Finetune button gives you a popup with palette suggestions and tools for adjusting the color.

There has been a great deal of interest in Second Life lately at the company where I work. (Yeah, I know — going from pallet jacks to virtual worlds. What can I say, it’s an interesting place to work.)

Anyway, when I want to learn something it’s usually best for me to just jump in and start muddling around, so that’s what I’ve been doing with Second Life. I have a little plot of land and a little building. Right now there’s not much there — a display to show the latest ResearchBuzz news and a newspaper box where you can pick up the latest issue of the newsletter. Upstairs there’s a whiteboard and chalkboard and some chairs — if I knew of a good way to do Web browsing in-world I can see where it could be fun to use the room to have small sessions of search engine Hacky Sack.

I am intrigued by the possibilities and more determined than ever to figure out the scripting. But as I grow more aware of what’s available, I’m thinking a lot about how the “official” resources of SL — the Swedish embassy, for example — could be cataloged and exhibited, or even made more searchable — searchability in SL doesn’t exactly overwhelm me.

If you’re running an official (Swedish embassy for example) or an educational (library, school, teaching resource, tutorial location) location, please drop me a note or let me know. I’m going to be doing some organizational/display experiments. (The first experiment will be in making signage that doesn’t look dreadful.) Or feel free to drop by my little building; it’s at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Kouhun/122/213/49 . I am very much an SL newbie so this is a total work-in-progress.

There has been some online declaration that Second Life is All That and a bucket of Moon Pies. Not quite sure that I agree with that assessment, but I find the idea of organizing information and available resources across a wide variety of categories — in a virtual word that offers scads of interactivity and lots of tools — to be an interesting and fun puzzle.

This one is for the text nerds! Oh, and the SEO people. You too. Topicalizer allows you to enter a block of text or an URL from which text is to be extracted, and provides you with a variety of statistics on said text. Check it out at http://www.topicalizer.com/ .

Prompted to enter either a URL or a block of text, I entered http://www.poemuseum.org/selected_works/print_telltale.html , which is a fairly plain copy of Poe’s The Tell Tale Heart. (If you’re going to analyze URLs, make sure they have as little extraneous text as possible, because everything gets thrown into the hopper for analysis.) Once you do that and give Topicalizer a few seconds, you’ll get a dizzying array of information about that particular block of text.

Like what? Tons of stuff, including word count, average number of words per sentence/paragraph, most frequent words and phrases (phrases cover varying number of words), longest and shortest sentence, three different estimates of readability, suggested keywords, and an abstract. Now for a short story the abstract doesn’t create anything very comprehensible, but for the nonfiction pages I tested it wasn’t bad.

The main part of the site is interesting, especially if you want to get an idea of the general structure of a chunk of text. But Topicalizer also has a tools page. (Some of these tools require just a block of text, you can’t use an URL.) From this page you can do several things, include find similar documents and do augmented keyword extraction (REALLY augmented, like getting “fibrocystic disease of the breast” from the first paragraph of Tell Tale Heart augmented).

Topicalizer has both a FAQ and a blog. An API is also available. VERY interesting.