What do the colors mean? Are they random?

When you click on a country it fades out the other country names I would like it to zoom in on the selected bar. -MH

Colors are a bit intense. Some attention to the palette, and the size of the palette you’re using, would be helpful, design-wise. -GL
Are the colors the same across countries? Does purple always indicate the same adjective? The chart has a random look because, e.g. “loud” and “thin” have almost the same color. Could you reduce the number of adjectives you examined? 
– What you were describing with winnowing the list would defeat the purpose of my project. The idea wasn’t to show how fat we think Americans are compared to the British, or how many people think Americans are stupid, but to show what qualities we associate with the people of a country. Limiting the list to only a certain small set of adjectives would eliminate a lot of the strange and fun responses such as that Greeks are “the best”, Canadians are “afraid of the dark”, and that Koreans are “good at Starcraft”, and IMO would take all of the funness out of the application.

I remember reading her blog post and I think she manually chose each term as positive, neutral, or negative (used for color)

I’d love for you to be able to rearrange the bars (to compare how healthy one country is to any other, etc)—never mind, I see you’ve done this

Here’s a link to her blog post: words/colors a little easier to see: http://golancourses.net/2010spring/01/27/project-1-the-world-according-to-google-suggest/
The bars are very pretty, but I’m having a hard time interpreting the data: the colors are a little confusing, if they’re not random maybe include a color legend? But, nice concept in any case! 🙂  EDIT: you just explained the ideas of your colors–seems like there’s a lot going on in your graph.    -Amanda

Culturally speaking, this has a lot of resonance. (Whoops, guess I wasn’t paying attention – I look up and you’re showing interactivity. Maybe the interactivity should be more prominent in your discussion or talks, or maybe less subtle than simply graying out the other countries.)  -SB

maybe just alternate two colors, such as black and white, to simplify and increase legibility – Jon

Great project