This is a purely technical, experimental, and mostly boring post

Nbii.gov partners 2007-2008

alliance amc art basin biodiversity conservation cswgcin department ducks energy engineering epa explorer forest galveston gbif information institute interdisciplinary invasive james land mapping marine monitoring montana national natural noaa nsf nwr parks pbif pondicherry program project protection resources resources- river science service species state texas university university- university-national usfs usgs

created at TagCrowd.com

As it says, I used TagCrowd.com, a quick and easy way to turn text into a tag cloud. I especially like doing it to my information science papers to see how big the words data, information and academic get, usually correlated to how boring my paper is. The best part is seeing the words you don't expect pop out at you. Like service, or even better, texas.

Many good tools exist to do this for you, starting with all kinds of input: your blog, website, excel spreadsheet (IBM Many Eyes = lots of text analysis tools), or just cut and paste text from anywhere. A list of cloud generators can be found here.

The cloud you see above is part of my practicum project this semester, studying the National Biological Information Infrastructure (Nbii.gov). I'll spare you the details. This is just a test--don't go thinking that this is valid, complete data, 'cause it aint.