Social Ch@nge

The last few posts have generated some terrific, thoughtful responses from our community.  Time to take a break from all that deep thinking, people!  The holidays are upon us, and so here are a few of my favourite web toys – possibly useful in the non-profit office.  Maybe.

The Rasterbator!
The Rasterbator creates huge, rasterized, pixelated pictures from any of your jpgs. Upload an image to the website, print the resulting multi-page pdf file, and assemble the pages into a massive poster. The final product can be up to 20 meters in size! Just imagine – Obama across your living room wall! Or Sarah Palin – whatever works.

http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/

Wordle
Wordle is a toy that creates “word clouds” from text that you enter – copy and paste your latest manifesto, for example. The clouds are formatted to give greater emphasis to words that appear more frequently in the original text. Then you can tweak your clouds to make them pretty – different fonts, layouts, color schemes.  Your can share the final cloud with others, and it’s oddly fascinating to see what others have created.

http://www.wordle.net/

Website Maps

This site creates a beautiful map of any website that you enter.  Like Wordle, this verges on the edge of being useful – but mainly creates great geek art for your cubicle.

http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/