Waiting to Exhale

Check out the essay by Peggy Noonan in today's Weekend Wall Street Journal, entitled A Hope for America, all about the nation's heightened anxiety, the rough election season, and "the sense that our great institutions are faltering and our leaders have gone astray." Here below, is an excerpt—her take on the power of social media to upend, expand, and re-phrase the political debate:

"...Two huge teams are in a massive public brawl in an era in which the Internet has liberated everyone in the country from the old restrictions, the old establishment, the old, encrusted media monopoly. YouTube has yielded, this year, the most moving and wittiest advertisements about each of the candidates. Professional political consultants with their piece of the buy didn't produce them, artists did. For Obama, it was the video by will.i.am, with the Obama speech and the snatches of song made from his words. More than anything else this year, [this Obama video] captured the feeling behind his movement. The McCain video, alas, was anti-McCain, and keyed off the will.i.am video. It featured young people and artists taking snatches of McCain speeches, turning them into song, and then starting to...freak out as they listened to the words. It made you laugh out loud. Anyway, one of the untold stories of the year is the failure of the political professionals to compete with the art and brightness of the nonprofessionals..."

(Photo illustration: Boy With Face Paint/istock.com)

Wordles to the Wise

There's a guy at IBM's Collaborative User Experience research group, a senior software engineer named Jonathan Feinberg, who creates what are called "wordles"—word pictures that map the frequency of words used in a speech or, say, a nonprofit mission statement. Feinberg's idea is simple: the more frequently a word occurs, the bigger it appears.

Will wordles change the world? Hardly. But don't underestimate their power to clarify a message or spot a good (or bad) mission statement in a heartbeat.

Consider the wordle, above, of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's recently televised interview with Charles Gibson of ABC, which includes her assertion that she "knows Russia" because it is so close in proximity to her home state of Alaska. Below, take a look at a wordle of Barack Obama's acceptance speech at last month's Democratic convention in Denver. Change is big—literally (as measured by word size here)—but not as big as the word "promise."


But even wordles can't (as both Obama and John McCain have said this election season) "put lipstick on a pig." See below. It's a wordle of the mission statement for a dot-org called VBAC, a home-birth advocacy group based in the United Kingdom. The message here? A muddy mission statement is—in any form—incomprehensible.