Just for Fun Friday: Cleverbot and Bacon Ipsum

Here are some cool things we’re playing around with this week. Take a look just for fun, and feel free to share some of your favorite online tools or destinations with us too!

Dan is fond of Cleverbot for the entertainment value. Cleverbot is a web application created back in 1988 that tries to mimic actual human conversation. It takes input from a user and selects previously entered phrases from its database of conversations to respond. Supposedly it’s like “talking with the collective community of the Internet.” Check it out and see what you think, but don’t expect any “deep” conversations.

Carnivorous staffer Eddie has a new favorite indulgence in Bacon Ipsum for meatier mockup filler text. If you’re a designer with a hankering for cuts of meat, Bacon Ipsum should satisfy your appetite. Not to discriminate against vegetarians though, there is also Veggie Ipsum on the menu.

Happy Friday and have a great weekend!

Web Design Links: Stock Photos, HTML5 Markup, Bookmark Tool, Dummy Text

Take a look at these great web design resources the team has discovered this week!

Tom Z: Here's a resource for finding stock photos

Dan: 7 lovely things about HTML5 Markup

Alexis: fun dummy text generators

Tom M: Instapaper is a nice little site where you can create an account, then basically bookmark items you find online that you want to read later (for those times, you see a good tweet or a link in an email, but you really don’t have time to read it).  With Instapaper, you easily bookmark the item using your browser, then you can pull up the link later in your browser or on your mobile device.  And it not only brings up the text of the page you wanted to read, it also strips a lot of the other junk (ads) from the display.

What useful and fun online tools have you found recently to help with your own work? We'd love to hear about them, so please share.