Good news! You can now post your Tagxedo artwork to Twitter or Facebook directly from Tagxedo. There are the Twitter and Facebook buttons at the lower left corner of the Tagxedo app.

Clicking either one of them brings up a simple dialog, with the picture:

Let's say you click the Twitter button. Go ahead and edit the tweet, or leave it alone (by default, it says "Check out this gorgeous artwork I made with Tagxedo!"), and then press the "Post to Twitter" button. A new window will popup and ask for your permission to post to Twitter on your behalf.

Note: If you don't see any popup window, chance is that your popup blocker disallows the popup, in which case please allow it, at least for this site.

Once permission is granted, the picture and the tweet will be upload to Twitter. Here's what was posted to my @tagxedo Twitter account, picture included:

Neat, isn't it?

Similarly, you can post a photo to your Facebook account by clicking the Facebook button. Edit your message, and hit "Post to Facebook". A new window will popup and you'll be asked to grant permission to Tagxedo (to publish a photo on your behalf). Here's what I got:

Hope you like it! And in case you do, please help me spread the word by sharing your artwork with your Facebook friends and Twitter followers. I bet a majority of your friends have not seen Tagxedo, and I'm sure many will be amazed and thankful for your sharing!

Three months ago I added a new font called "Simple Slum G" to Tagxedo's font collection. It's funky, playful, a bit weird. And it has a strange name. But it has now becomes my favorite font, by far.

In my opinion, at least for now, it is the perfect font for Tagxedo.

Check out the following Simple Slum G artworks from Daily Tagxedo. Since its October debut, this font has been featured in at least 80% of the Daily Tagxedoes. I didn't do it out of laziness. Instead, Simple Slum G simply looks and feels better than the alternatives.

What make this font special? In general, what makes a good font for Tagxedo? It's hard to quantify, but I come to the following rule-of-thumb after almost two years of obsession with Tagxedo (as a user, not just as its creator). A great font must (1) have a relatively thick ink density, (2) stand upright rather than slanted, (3) have a relative high height-to-width aspect ratio (so that a typical word does not look like a very long rectangle), but not too high, (4) be playful, interesting, but not too "cute" and definitely not too boring, (5) present a unique personality without being too overwhelming...

Okay, what I described was still pretty abstract and fuzzy. But I do know a good Tagxedo font when I see one, and Simple Glum G is definitely the best font for Tagxedo that I have seen. I encourage you to give it a try *. Have fun!

* Hint: Simple Slum G works best with the H/V Orientation.

I found a very nice "Snowflake" font http://www.fontspace.com/skeldale-house-treasures/ryp-snowflake-8 and immediately loaded it into Tagxedo to see how it looks. The font has glyphs for exactly 26 characters, A to Z. So I typed in "A B C D ... Z", turned on "Normalize Frequency", turned on "Allow Duplication", turned off "Remove Common Words", selected the snowflake shape, and voila! Nice isn't it?

It's a bit late, but still, Merry Christmas to all!

We lost a tech giant today. Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie, co-creator of Unix and the C programming language with Ken Thompson, has passed away at the age of 70. Ritchie has made a tremendous amount of contribution to the computer industry, directly and indirectly affecting (improving) the lives of most people in the world, whether you know it or not.

I am very fond of the C programming language. Despite all its flaws, I love the simplicity of C, and the raw power it gives me. And his book "The C Programming Language" (co-authored with Brian Kernighan) truly set a standard for excellence. I remember, right after I finished reading the book in my freshman year, I gained a sense of invincibility - that there would be no language too hard to learn, no program too difficult to write. Of course, naïveté was in play then, but it was nonetheless an eye opener, and I loved what I saw.

Here's my tribute to the great Dennis Ritchie, a word cloud made of words from the book "The C Programming Language." Not just a few paragraphs, but words from the entire book. The top 10 most frequent words are function, declaration, expression, character, pointer, return, int, program, operator, and value. The top word, function, appears a total of 717 times. Those who have read the book would not be surprised by this list, as Kernighan and Ritchie wasted no time on fluff, but instead focused on getting the concepts across.

RIP, Dennis Ritchie.

Here's my small tribute to the great visionary of our time. RIP, Steve Jobs.

Where Were You on September 11, 2001?

More than 28,800 readers answered this question posted by the New York Times, and I am sure it was on the mind of millions more, mine included. I kept reading the comments and was completely mesmerized.

The New York Times took the words of these 28,800 readers and counted the number of times a word or a phrase appears in the response. The top 10 words are: TV, day, class, school, plane, home, hit, first, work, and news. I turned all the words and their frequencies into a Tagxedo, in the shape of the continental US. Obviously the Tagxedo does not and cannot capture the entire range of emotion, but at least it helped me remember that fateful day, the raw feelings.

Here's the link to the New York Times survey: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/09/08/us/sept-11-reckoning/map911-browse.html

 

Interactive: http://www.tagxedo.com/artful/8aa399de43ff4b98

If you believe Facebook is worth $70B, you believe each of her 700M users is worth $70B / 700M = $100. Since LinkedIn has 100M users, and suppose each is worth $100 too (lower social value, higher professional value), LinkedIn should be worth $100 x 100M = $10B, or about $100 a share. As simple as that!

Disclaimer: I don't own or plan to own any LNKD stock (perhaps I should take a closer :D).

Today's Daily Tagxedo is about the Microsoft purchase of Skype for a cool $8.5B, made in the shape of Skype's iconic logo:

I use a different shape every day to make Daily Tagxedo unique, but the Skype logo was already feature five months ago, so what to do?

The trick is to use negative space. When you add an image, you have the option to set the interior to either black (default) or white. By changing it to white, you ask Tagxedo to fill the lighter part of the image, instead of the darker part. Here's what the Tagxedo made instead with positive space (same text, font, theme, and orientation):

When done correctly, Tagxedo made with negative space can look even better than the original. Want to see more? Check out Steve Jobs and Bashar al-Assad.

Interactive: http://www.tagxedo.com/artful/c3cfe3ed2ab041ca

President Obama made an important announcement tonight - Osama bin Laden was killed by CIA operatives in Pakistan.

The American psyche in the the "Decade from Hell" was largely defined by the 9/11 terrorist attack and its aftermath, hence this is a wonderful ending to an important chapter of American history, though nobody would dare to use the phrase "Mission Accomplished" again. Just to summarize, here's a Tagxedo I made, made of news articles about the demise of Osama bin Laden.

For all the flaws and disappointments people feel about President Obama, I think he deserves at least a little bit of credit for following through on one of his primary campaign promises regarding national security - that capturing and killing Osama bin Laden is priority number one.

Obama: "If we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable or unwilling to take them out, then I think that we have to act and we will take them out"

Obama: "We will kill bin Laden. We will crush al Qaeda, that has to be our biggest national security priority"

McCain (when asked by Larry King what he'd do if he learned that bin Laden is in Pakistan): "Larry, I'm not going to go there and here's why, because Pakistan is a sovereign nation"

Geez, I'm glad I voted for "that one", who BTW just won his second term.

Enough political opinion from me. Here's a Tagxedo made of the transcript of Obama's speech (source).