Robin Blandord came up with the idea to run his CV through Wordle.net to see what it would look like as a tag cloud. It’s been repeated by Ellybabes, Sinéad Cochrane and Paul Browne. Sorry that it’s in simple black & white and not visually pleasing as the others; I thought about adding it to my physical CV or embed it in the files to see if there was a change in uptake. Given that most (if not all) recruitment agencies parse the résumés they recieve through something similar, it might make sense. Wordle is a Java application which parses text, ignores common words, and creates a tag cloud. The size of the word is proportional to the how often it occurs in the CV.
Putting something like a résumé through it might take a bit of tweaking. Plurals are (currently) counted separately, and other common phrases show up. I needed to tweak my CV to stop my address showing up in the tag cloud for instance.
The other thing is how “management” looms large over both “software” and “database” (with “sql” peeking in there). I didn’t expect that, nor expect to see something similar on the other technical people’s clouds.
Does it give an accurate picture which should be used as a reflection or consideration for employment, or is it really easy to “game” the results to create an artificial profile?
And given the full social media treatment, does a tag cloud of a persons delicious account cast a different reflection than their résumé?
A long time ago, at MashpCamp I thougth about combining a Google Map with the geodata of pubs and a ratings system to generate a “Rate-my-pint” type application, which I’m sure a brewery could use for customer support and ensure that their product is being served properly. This is probably more useful.
I have no idea who made the Dublin Pub Crawl map, but I’m impressed. Essentially it’s a Google map with route calculations which allow you to create your own own pub crawl through Dublin City. However I’m not too sure how to get the data off the computer and in a format which would survive a “12 pubs of Christmas” tradition.
Choose an area, like Temple Bar or Dublin 15, pick some pubs you’d like to include, if you like. And you can edit the maps and add other pubs.
Like those outside of Dublin?
I suppose it’s all about how intelligent the routing code is, but would adding a bunch of Cork, Limerick and Galway pubs just mess things up, or make the map more useful for those who don’t want a pint of plain in the pale? And it it works, then we could have “centres of excellence”, in drinking.
And speaking of large companies, David Berlind (who set up Mashup Camp) has an interesting wrinkle against the existence of the Kindle, a kind of Fahrenheit 1981.4. Sounds far fetched, well I know one Apple advocate who has turned anti-Apple due to the DRM and legal disputes with iTunes so she can’t get music she paid for back. Scary how knowledge could be destroyed.
Mali created a poem about what teachers do. About how they inspire and alter the way you think (spot the trend here). Of course, he got something wrong. The video is not what teachers make… its what GOOD teachers make.
To be honest, the word mashup makes me think of music before technology, but technology internet technology mash ups are the best thing to happen to the web.
A mash up is a mixing of two disparate elements to make a unified whole. Those elements could be Lilly Allen singing “LDN” mixed with Chad Jackon’s “(Hear the drummer) Get wicked” or a Google map mixed with Dublin bus routing information and timetable to generate all the usable bus routes near any location.
Well Mashup Camp and Mashup University are coming to Dublin (after an abortive attempt earlier in the year) in November, and personally I want to go to the Uni sessions as I want to learn this. What can I say, I’m used to half of this, taking data from a single source and manipulating it to reveal the underlying structure. Mashups mean that you take the data from one (or more) source(s) and manipulate it to fit the structure of another data set (e.g. crime data and a geographic map).
Of course the sign-up for the uni isn’t working but…
In the meantime, here is a mashup of a different sort… Dunproofin’s “LDN WDK“
