A Tiny Trio

Because AxisPortals loves the small but mighty, today’s post highlights three free and convenient web services that should be in everyone’s collection of bookmarks.

TinyURL

TinyURL is a nifty little application that makes sharing web-based resources much easier.  Often, we wish to share a web page, an online article, or a blog post with others, but often the URL’s of these resources (their web addresses) are impossibly long, which means that if we try to cut and paste them into an email, they break, making it impossible for our recipients simply to click on them. Tinyurl to the rescue!  Just past that long and complicated URL into the little box, click the “Make TinyURL” button, and you automagically get a manageable URL that’s very easy to share.  Neato!  AxisPortals has been relying on this service for a long time, and can’t imagine how anyone ever gets along without it.  This is the polite, audience aware way to share a link.

TinySong

TinySong makes sharing musical sentiments quick and simple.  If you want to say “You Send Me” to a loved one, just enter the name of the singer or the title of the song, select the version you’re after from the results list, and pass along the link.  The TinySong service is provided by Grooveshark, a free online music service that will definitely keep you and your computer in the groove.

TinyPic

TinyPic is a video and image sharing service that is particularly useful for quickly locating backgrounds and illustrations for blogs, social networking sites,  and webpages.  Fair warning:  not every image available on TinyPic is appropriate for the younger set, and the site does rely heavily on advertising.  Still, the service can’t be beat for speed and convenience.  For instance, it didn’t take long at all for AxisPortals to find both a snowy wood and a sunny stretch of beach.

AxisPortals Aphorism (Courtesy of Norman Lear):  Life is made up of small pleasures. Happiness is made up of those tiny successes. The big ones come too infrequently. And if you don’t collect all these tiny successes, the big ones don’t really mean anything.

I See What You Mean

We have access to so much information that it can be difficult to keep track of it all, to make use of it all, or even to sort through some relatively small segment of it so that the information is relavant, reasonably clear, and useful.  AxisPortals is a fan of the visualization tools that transform data into graphic representations that are accessible to mere mortals.  Here are some current favorites:

1. XMind’s concept mapping and brainstorming tool is appealing on several levels.  First, it’s very easy to use, and can be downloaded for free.  This makes it an extremely appealing alternative to Mindjet’s MindManager, which is awesomely powerful and plays beautifully with the MS suite of tools, but is unfortunately quite expensive–even prohibitively so in some settings.  XMind is available in a pro version that offers additional features, but even the pro version only costs a very affordable $50.00 a year or so.  Plus, XMind has a social networking/collaboration element that makes it especially useful and appealing.
2. IBM’s Many Eyes is quickly capturing imaginations and users, and is already powering The New York Times Visualization Lab.  Many Eyes makes it possible for users either to connect and visualize  data sets that they upload themselves, or to connect and visualize preexisting data sets that others have already uploaded.  Even plain text can be uploaded and examined from several visual angles.  (Many Eyes has  recently incorporated a Wordle generation feature, which makes it possible very quickly to see central ideas and overall patterns in a text based on word frequency.)
3. AxisPortals has also been experimenting with Personal Brain.  This tool can manage conceptual relationships of great depth and complexity, and is a more creative, less map and flowchart oriented visualization tool.  See the Top Twelve Uses  for potential applications.  The free demo version includes all of the Pro class features for the first thirty days of the trial.  There are also some terrific tutorials available to ease the learning curve.

Visualization tools can help us explore and manage all sorts of complicated information, from the ideas and emerging inventions knocking around in our very own noggins to the facts and statistics stored in databases.  Best of all, these tools can help us formulate new ideas. 

AxisPortals Aphorism:  Seeing plays a crucial role in generating and sharing meaning. 

Or

Seeing makes meaning.