clipped from www.blogschmog.net

Kyle Gabler’s Human Brain Cloud is a masterful time suck.

As if I needed another distraction … enter the Human Brain Cloud.

Although billed as multi-player, HBC is really an individual exercise—one that can quickly turn minutes into hours. You see a word or short phrase from the 530,000 already suggested by other players, and you enter the first response that enters your head. Although you type alone, you benefit from the wisdom of the masses. The word associations you make are scanned for matches and listed with the rest of your recent work. You can view the cloud, which is really a visual thesaurus kind of weighted network showing the connections to a given term.

Marketers could conceivably enter a term and check the related words, in part to avoid ambiguity and semantic competition, and partly to steer clear of easy targets for derogatory associations. Designers might peer into the brain of specific users to see how they make sense of certain words.