Technola : Public Interest Law & Technology Updates & Commentary : Matthew Burnett & Kate Bladow : Tech Advice for the Non-Profit Legal Sector

I like word clouds. You can quickly get a feel for how often a word is used in a speech, article, or other block of text. For example, below is a word cloud, which was created with Wordle, based on Technola's front page.

Technola Word Cloud

With the many free online tools available, word clouds are extremely easy to make. There is even a tool for Twitter. TwitterSheep lets you create a word cloud from the bios of a user's followers. For example, a lot of @accesstojustice's followers use "lawyer," "attorney," "law," or "justice" in their bios.

However, other than quickly gauging a piece of content's focus, how would poverty law advocates benefit from word clouds? Or are word clouds just pretty images? - K

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The ability to visually represent data is an important tool for advocacy, fundraising, and reporting. Below are a few free online tools that will allow you to quickly create graphs, charts and other visualizations.

• Google Docs – Google Docs has Charts and Widget features that allow you to create graphs and charts that can be shared and embedded into websites.
• ManyEyes – This online tool (and community) allows you to easily upload data sets that can be made into a variety of charts and other visualizations, but requires that you publish your data online. It’s also a great place to find visualizations of census and other public data.
• DabbleDB – Allows you to create simple online databases as well as graphs and charts based on your data. It’s free if you share your data or $8 per user a month if you don’t.

Other online tools for creating graphs and charts include Swivel, iCharts and WidGenie. Google Docs, Many Eyes and DabbleDB were also covered in the “50 Tech Tips for Tough Economic Times” session at the 2009 EJC conference. [H/T to Laura Quinn for inspiring this post.] -M

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This week's Free Friday takes a look at mind/concept mapping software. Whether you're looking to visually map ideas, concepts or arguments, here are a few free software solutions to help you get the job done:

• Bubbl.us: The best thing about Bubbl.us is that it's entirely web-based, so there's nothing to download and it's easy to share and collaborate with others online. Features include the ability to email your mind map, save it as an image, and embed it on your blog or website.
• The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE): VUE is a project at Tufts UIT Academic Technology, which provides a visual environment for structuring, sharing and presenting digital information. All software in this category allows you to structure ideas, concepts and information, but VUE shines it its ability to easily integrate digital content, whether stored locally or on the web. It also excels at presentation. VUE has good user documentation and a nice screencast overview.
• FreeMind: A more traditional mind mapping tool, FreeMind is a Java-based open source software. Its other potential uses include keeping track of projects, tracking research and as a knowledge base. Features include support of HTML links, one-click navigation, export map to HTML, an XML storage format and easy integration with many wikis. FreeMind doesn't support online sharing/collaboration or do well with rich graphics. - M

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Some time ago, I had picked up by Visualizing Information for Advocacy: An Introduction to Information Design from the Tactical Technology Collective. It turns out that the information wasn't what I was looking for, but it has an amazing list of open source tools that you can use to help convey information and design graphics. They are

• OpenOffice - an office productivity suite that has a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing program. (Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X under X11)
• NeoOffice - an office productivity suite that has a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing program. (Mac OS X)
• Ajax13 - a web-based office productivity suite that has a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation management, sketch tool, and media player.
• InkScape - a vector graphics editor that is similar to Illustrator, Freehand, or CorelDraw. (Windows, Linux, and Mac)
• PDFCreator - a tool to create PDF files. I use this tool regularly and have been pretty satisfied. I would recommend using this along with PDFBlender, which allows you to combine PDF files easily. (Windows)
• Scribus - a desktop publisher that has similar functionality to Microsoft Publisher. (Windows, Linux, and Mac)
• The GIMP - my favorite image and graphics editor. It is incredibly powerful, but people often complain that it isn't as user-friendly as Photoshop. I was too cheap to buy Photoshop, so the GIMP seemed like the right option for me. (Windows, Linux, and Mac)
• GIMPShop - a version of GIMP for people who want something that looks more like Photoshop. (Windows and Mac)

After finding that list, I can't wait for their next publication, Quick 'n' Easy Guide to Mapping for Advocacy, which should be available soon. I hope that it has a similar list of tools. - K

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