Mother to Invention

Sage advice from Jonathan Feinberg, the creator of one of our favorite cool tools, Wordle. In case you don’t remember, a previous blog entry talked about Wordle and its use by my son’s third-grade class.

Image courtesy of Jonathan Feinberg, Wordle creator

We contacted Jonathan Feinberg to ask him about his work on Wordle. He told us how Wordle came about and had some great advice for would-be developers and inventors:

“The single most important thing I’d tell any child (or grownup) who has an idea is to try the idea as soon as possible, and to waste as little time as possible thinking about it,” he said.

“When you actually make the thing you’re thinking of making, you find out much more about it than you could have by thinking about it. You might find that what seemed like a good idea was actually not so good. On the other hand, you might accidentally discover something even better in the doing. That’s certainly what happened with Wordle.”

Feinberg told us that Wordle came about because he needed to create a tag cloud for a web site he was making as part of his job at IBM Research. If you don’t know, tag clouds are groups of words where the size of the word is proportionate to the number of times it’s used in text.

This concept of a word cloud by Blackbelt Jones helped spark the idea for Wordle, www.wordle.net. Blackbelt Jones image courtesy of Jonathan Feinberg.

“I made a regular tag cloud, but thought it was boring,” Feinberg said. “But then a blogger, who called himself ‘Blackbelt Jones,’ created a very pretty and interesting tag cloud by using a computer drawing program. I thought, ‘Why can’t I write a computer program to do something like that?’”

Feinberg said he spent a couple of weeks thinking about how to do that, asking some friends for their ideas, and writing the actual computer program to do it. He eventually turned that computer program into the Wordle web site.

Learn more about Jonathan Feinberg by visiting his web site and the Wordle blog.