Apparently a true story I just heard from a former boss: Back when he managed Comdex, the giant tech show, he shared a PR manager with a rival VP. That VP often felt short-changed by the PR manager.

At the 2000 Comdex, a reporter got food poisoning at an off-site event and died the next day. My former boss, Michael Goodman, now president of Extra Mile Audience Research, worked most of the day with the PR manager to smooth out the buzz.

That afternoon, Goodman pulled the PR manager aside to warn her the Interop VP was very upset. She had complaining bitterly to him, “She never kills anyone at my events.”

Be sure you don’t miss Alex Vollmer’s excellent review of election day infographics. He wanted to see the margins of victory, percentage of precincts reporting, number of delegates at stake, and other goals. He looked at the New York Times online, CNN, National Public Radio and other media.

Today’s Wall Street Journal Online uses tag clouds—the first I’ve seen on that site—to compare Mitt Romney’s statement on religion with John F. Kennedy’s statement in the fall of 1960 as he ran for president.

It’s great to see the Wall Street Journal getting into information visualization (a.k.a. “infovis” among aficionados).

No big story has popped out at me yet. Smaller stories seem to emerge as I look closer.

As you’d expect, “religion” (in Romney’s statement) and “religious” (in Kennedy’s) pop out to about the same degree in both. Kennedy’s “catholic church” also dominates, while Romney’s “church” is not so prominent. Romney’s “faith” is bigger than his “church,” while I see no word comparable to “faith”—except “catholic church”—in Kennedy’s.

Romney’s “god” sits in the third row while Kennedy’s sits way in back.

Kennedy’s secular words sit up close, for example “constitution,” “election” and “oath.” In Romney’s crowd, the ones about religious and fundamental beliefs sit close: “faith,” “freedom,” “liberty,” “god,” and “church.”

The Journal credits Chirag Mehta’s Tagline Generator script and Michael Porter’s Porter Stemming Algorithm, ported to PHP by Richard Heyes. I don’t know what Mehta’s tool does, but let’s give credit where it’s due. The function of Porter’s tool seems clear enough from the Journal’s explanation: it finds word roots, I assume to align multiple words of similar meaning into one.

I would reproduce the tag clouds here if I dared to. Information does want to be free, but I think this would go outside the bounds of fair use. If you subscribe to the Wall Street Journal Online, you can see it here.

Here’s a morsel with possibly no practical value at all. It’s from last Sunday’s New York Times on what CEOs read:

“I used to tell my senior staff to get me poets as managers,” says Sidney Harman, founder of Harman Industries, a $3 billion producer of sound systems for luxury cars, theaters and airports … “Poets are our original systems thinkers,” he said. “They look at our most complex environments and they reduce the complexity to something they begin to understand.”