Cool Toys pics of the day: DoodleBuzz

DoodleBuzz: Typographic News Explorer:
http://www.doodlebuzz.com/

DoodleBuzz has a really interesting idea — to focus on random,
non-linear browsing to provoke serendipitous discovery. I like that it
is based on some open source code from Trevor McCauley of Adobe, and
shared as Creative Commons. I don’t like that it uses black, white &
red as the colors, since these might not be distinguishable to some
with color blindness.

There are many possible approaches to doing this. Most folks would
choose some sort of randomization algorithm to determine the root of
the Flash visualization, but Brendon Dawes decided to make it the
choice of the viewer. You draw a line, any sort of line, and the
headlines map themselves along that line. Interesting choice.

Using it is a little tricky, and I didn’t find it easy or obvious. It
also didn’t behave properly in Google Chrome on a Mac, so I had to get
some help from @ZenDoodles in Twitter (who seems to be no relation to
DoodleBuzz, merely illustrating a coincidental similarity of names).

To start a DoodleBuzz search you click on the Open Doodlebuzz red text
toward the right of the screen, then DRAW in the box to trigger
display of the search results. On my computer, the search field
self-populates with leading popular news topic of the day. When I
click in the search field to edit it, the flash visuals disappear.
Oops! For Zen Doodle, working in Firefox, she was able to get and
search terms she wanted. Here is an example.

Doodlebuzz: Health Care
http://www.doodlebuzz.com/search/Health%20Care/

That was when things got interesting. I was able to draw a nice snakey
line, which grabbed titles and then reoriented and zoomed in. I
selected a node, then dragged a new line off from that node, and
voilà! There was a star pattern of related concepts. Choose
one, and it limits the search results to that. You see a late browsing
of this in the image above.