Latimes.com borrowed another feature from the blogosphere with its coverage of President Bush’s State of the Union address.

The Times’ Eric Ulken (a former OJR staffer) constructed a keyword cloud using the 50 most frequently used words in Bush’s 2006 and 2002 speeches. The clouds, which give more visual weight to more frequently used words, allow readers to get a quick visual impression of the speech’s content.

Ulken used an online cloud generator to start, then narrowed that list to the top 50 words to build his custom clouds. “If I were a programmer, I’d have written a script to do this. Instead I used Excel to compute the point sizes and alphabetize the list,” Ulken wrote.

Clouds are often found on sites that make heavy use of tagging, such as Flickr. But the principle works on any leaden block of text that needs visual punch to grab readers online. As Ulken and the Times have shown.

Nonprofit organization Spirit of America recently launched Blog Safer, a wiki that hosts a series of updatable tips sheets on how to blog anonymously in countries that do not tolerate free speech.

The guides come in English, Chinese, Arabic and Persian — targeting countries like Iran, Zimbabwe, China and Saudi Arabia — places where bloggers have been subject to filtering, interrogation, torture and even imprisonment. Each guide has a specific audience in mind and outlines the steps a blogger can take to avoid identification and possible arrest.

The wiki format allows international bloggers to edit the guides to reflect a more accurate picture of the situation in their countries. Bloggers are invited to translate the guides to other languages in order to expand the project’s audience.

ESPN.com has launched a new design for its homepage. There’s much to like in the new look, which dumps the vertical left navigation rail, thereby allowing larger headline links. The site’s softened its color palette significantly, as well. (You can compare with the old look via Archive.org.)

But one innovative feature of ESPN’s new home page drove me nuts: The story package links under “Spotlight,” under the main package in the left column, rotate from sport to sport. That left me playing the journalistic equivalent of “Whack A Mole,” trying to skim the package summaries fast enough to click through before the links rotated to the next sports’. ESPN does provide a moving circle graphic which lets you know visually how much time you have until the next rotation. But that just makes the reader feel like a game show contestant playing the lightning round.