island⁹⁴

I’m very proud to be officially launching Panlexicon.com: a unique thesaurus. Using intuitive “tag clouds” to represent synonyms, Panlexicon makes discovering the word you want quick, easy and explorational.

Panlexicon’s current functions allow you to:

• First, perform a lookup on a single word and receive a weighted cloud of synonyms.
• Second, view synonyms that overlap across multiple words either by entering the words manually, or clicking on words already in the cloud to further refine your search.

For example, performing a search on “cool” provides a wide variety of synonyms from “chilly”, to “unimpassioned”, to “groovy”. Refining the search using cool and nifty provides more refined synonyms.

By varying the size of the typeface, like tag clouds do, the most relevant terms pop out at you allowing you to quickly scan through large lists of words. Also, because the algorithm is a little fuzzy, you may run across related words that provide better context.

Panlexicon was developed jointly with Rebecca who originally proposed the project and did much of the research on thesauri and helped develop the word relevance algorithms. …read more

My pet project, MeetAmeriCorps.com has finally passed that development milestone that marks a “social network”: Buddylists. To be a little more haute, we’ve decided to call them “contact lists”, but the concept is the same: you can demarcate people who you like/know/want-to-be-on-your-contact-list.

Since I haven’t really been advertising it too heavily, Meet AmeriCorps was a directory–now it’s a “social network”–of AmeriCorps and AmeriCorps*VISTA volunteers who are either currently serving or alumni. It’s pretty neat stuff, doesn’t look to shabby and, disclosing I am the lead developer on the project, actually kind’ve useful.

…read more