Blog In The Clouds

I need to jump on this bandwagon before everyone gets to it before I do. Keb had her word cloud on her site as a “too bored to blog” post, but I thought it was great. I’ve seen word clouds before, but never knew how to generate one. As a word cloud it seems fairly representative of what I think the blog is about.

The gimmick of the Snapshirt folks is to sell you a tee-shirt with your blog’s (or anybody blog’s, for that matter) word cloud on it. Tee shirts are one of the true money making opportunities of the cyberworld. They are something tangible that represent an intangible affiliation. I think selling tee shirts is what keeps most webcomics afloat. I know my son has contributed to that economic model with this shirt he (and by he, I mean with my money) bought off the web.

I belong to the “been there, seen that, bought the tee shirt” school of travel souvenirs. Shirts are practical and useful. My problem is that I already have a dresser drawer full of tee shirts that I never get around to wearing, but hate to give up. I think I have an Eagles Hell Freezes Over Tour tee shirt that I have never worn. The only problem with clothing as mementoes is that they wear out. If I still had my softball jersey tee from the Van Halen II tour, it would be worth a ton of money, but it must have become a car cleaning rag decades ago.

My most recent tee shirt purchase was a bootleg CafePress Achenblog tee shirt created by kbertucci (nee Reader) of Read/Think/Live. I swooped in and ordered one before Joel Achenbach, the ostensible writer of the blog, put the kibosh on this enterprise.

As Cindy Sheehan recently demonstrated, tee shirts are also speech. More than anything else about your appearance, a printed or logo shirt says tons about your beliefs, values, and consumer habits. I’m just not sure what a tee shirt with a blog word cloud would say about me. Actually, I think I know exactly what it says, and I don’t think I want to say it.

Several years ago, I was at a book reading/signing by Neal Stephenson for Cryptonomicon. One of the other people there was the archetypal pot-bellied, stringy-haired, presumably Linux-using, cypher-hacker. He was wearing a tee shirt with something along these lines on it:

WARNING

This shirt is classified as a munition and
may not be exported from the United
States, or shown to a foreign national

RSA
encryption in perl

#!/bin/perl -s-- -export-a-crypto-system-sig
$k,$n)=@ARGV;$m=unpack(H.$w,$m."\0"x$w),$_=

{REMAINDER DELETED BY ME FOR PARANOID
NATIONAL SECURITY REASONS}

I pointed out the shirt to my wife and explained why that shows what a geek he was. She just turned to me and said, “You got the joke, what does that make you?”

I am such a dork. There I said it. Now I don’t need the blog cloud tee shirt.