Textalyzer, a free online tool, combines Microsoft Word-style readability statistics with  detailed “instance counting” for up to (it says) 1000 words. That means it will display a table with up to the 1000 most commonly used words in your document; I doubt anyone would ever need that many, but it’s there if you need it. Textalyzer [...]

Just kidding. He’s still in prison. (Huh? Catch up here.) But a commenter pointed me toward this recent video of Attila in prison speaking with author Julian Rubinstein. (Chris on viewing the video: “This guy is all over the place! I think we share a brain type.”) So other than the fact that I’m apparently [...]

We’re into “holiday travel season,” folks. As such, the TSA’s launched a new campaign called “SIMPLIFLY” to help people get through airport security as quickly as possible. If they had done a little research on the name before choosing it, though, they might have decided on something different: No comment necessary, I think.

Rupert Murdoch said last week that he’d like to make the online Wall Street Journal–to which over 1 million reader subscribe–free. [AP via Wired.com] Frankly, I’d forgotten the WSJ was a pay site–’cause I never visit it. Let’s see: It costs $79 a year to access most WSJ content on WSJ.com. But as Wikipedia says, [...]

Want more Tuesday’s Tools? Click here! Your characters’ names are one of their most important aspects. In most cases, readers will learn their names from a dust jacket or other promotional materials before learning anything else about them, so why not make the names good ones? Kabalarians.com used to have a much more extensive list [...]

Flickr:mrjorgen New findings have uncovered a design flaw at the interface where the brain encounters a computer screen: there are no online channels for the multiple signals the brain uses to calibrate emotions. Face-to-face interaction, by contrast, is information-rich. We interpret what people say to us not only from their tone and facial expressions, but [...]

The Christian Science Monitor’s language blog, Verbal Energy, is pretty darn good. Just thought you’d like to know.

A coworker pointed me in the direction of this Houston Chronicle piece about LOLcats. Yes, for real. It’s hard to be a twenty-something, cutting-edge Internet hipster and read about cutting-edge hip things written by People Who Just Don’t Get It, but Dwight Silverman is not one of those people. I remember when my sister and [...]

Leann Frola, a Naughton Fellow at Poynter, posted an interview she did with a MediaBistro blogger who’s been hired by the New York Times. The content of the interview is interesting; I always love to hear about bloggers who’ve been snapped up to teach mainstream media what’s what (hint, hint!), even if more questions are [...]

Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Meta from last January’s issue of Technology Review (how do I FIND these things?) profiles Charles Simonyi, who designed Microsoft Office (as well as worked on the world’s first word processor, back at Xerox PARC). He’s perhaps the most successful programmer in the world. (The article makes the [...]