All this economic weirdness...

Oh so this is how we got here....

Rick Webb from Barbarian with the bestest and most politically neutral explanation of how the economy (US, but applies just as much over here) got into the mess it's in

The difference a day makes

Did something happen to the Conservative leadership between Monday afternoon and Tuesday?

I've been playing around with data visualisation tools this week, and found this app that shows the contrast between Osborne's confrontantional 'blame Brown for everything' speech on Monday, and Cameron's 'Work together to beat the crisis' piece yesterday.

Shared text column in the middle is all the stuff you'd expect - "financial", "crisis", "money", etc. The differences are where it gets interesting: Osborne on the left (not a phrase I expect to hear too often) is focused on Brown, with the main references being 'borrowing', 'pounds' and 'taxes'. Cameron's text is focused on 'safe', 'security' and 'value', but the most interesting difference is in the use of verbs - 'Stop' and 'Tax' being Osborne's main uniques references, while Cameron, in direct contrast, wants to 'understand' and 'pass'.

Obviously this is an easy contrast to pick on: I'm not doing anything that Newsnight and Today haven't already done other than make a pretty pattern out of it. But as someone who is routinely putting media packs or client briefs into Wordle to pick up on things that the authors might have missed, there's some great cross referencing to be done here. For instance, what about it you could compare the tag clouds of two brands on Brand Tags.