Who knew a thesaurus could be this cool?
It’s always exciting to find a new tool that gets you out of your creative rut and helps you see things a bit differently.
For me, the tool du jour is Thinkmap’s VisualThesaurus.com. Sure, I’ve used Thesaurus.com and Dictionary.com for years, and can’t complain - I generally find what I’m looking for. But I’m not often inspired.
With VisualThesaurus.com, you’re inspired - and educated, and entertained. It uses a dynamic technology to map words that are related to one another. So they happily bounce to their rightful place on the screen, let you move them around and find out what they mean - and discover completely new directions for creative concepts.
Every day, I get a new “word of the day” from VisualThesaurus. I’ve signed up for these before but have always found them pretty stiff and formal. VisualThesaurus, however, defines words with fun examples and anecdotes. So you never get a definition full of yet more words you don’t understand.
So the tool is great fun, but I’m finding that the best thing VisualThesaurus.com may be its website. They’ve got blogs. They’ve got articles. Tips, tricks, and advice. Something new every day for marketing and communications people.
And most importantly, they are an outstanding example of how brands can expand, engage their audience, and give the sense of being THE hub for the latest and most useful knowledge. Something we can all learn from.
(If you’re curious about VisualThesaurus.com, you can download a free trial on their site.)
September 6th, 2007 at 8:51 pm
I love this thing, and I use it when writing, generating ideas or just for plain, simple fun! For people who haven’t been raised in an English-speaking environment, Visual Thesaurus is a great tool for expanding vocabulary. In actual fact, for expats like me, who are not constantly surrounded by the beauties of the English language in everyday life, it’s just a great way of keeping up with the language.
Language lovers and idea freaks alike, you just have to try it!