Dear Dustin

I’m a teacher in Kenya. We struggle to get textbooks and our internet is very slow, but I wanted to thank you for your wonderful site which enables me to share brilliant graphics and thought provoking data with my students. Out here in Sub saharan Africa we sometimes feel a bit peripheral to what is going on in the rest of the world, but your images help our kids to feel in touch (and save busy teachers a lot of time trawling through the net)

Thanks again

<Sigh> It feels so good to know my work here is accomplishing more than providing fodder for snarky graphic designers and bloggers.

If you enjoy this blog on a regular basis and would like to contribute to it’s upkeep (and my sanity) please click on the below donation box. Any amount is appreciated – even just a couple bucks would be fantastic.

Thankfully, the bandwidth requirements actually declined somewhat in the past year – after Google tweaked their search engine algorithms. Prior to that, Chart Porn was consuming >350GB/month of bandwidth, and showing up as high as fourth in Google searches for the word “porn” – hehe.  That was pretty hilarious. In January 2011, for example, of the 20 million people who saw Chart Porn in their search results for “porn”, 200,000 actually clicked on it anyway, despite the clear “An addictive collection of beautiful charts, graphs, maps…” description. People are weird.

You may recall that I started experimenting with ads last year. That has been moderately successful – but still doesn’t cover monthly costs. A new development has been offers on an almost weekly basis to post infographics for cash – sometimes for as much as $50/each!?!  I usually tell them to send me the infographic and if I like it, I’ll post it for free. I believe the main draw of Chart Porn is its curatorial taste, and would hate to dilute that with paid content.

Thanks for your support! If Chart Porn makes you laugh, or look at the world a little differently, or inspires your own visualization designs, then please take the time to click on the box and PayPal a donation. If you can’t swing a few bucks now, I completely understand – times are tough out there. Don’t worry – I’ll keep posting cool charts either way.

History Shots – Elegant graphics and wall art on a variety of historical subjects (politics, sports, music, science, etc). These really are slick — if you don’t want one for yourself, I guarantee you’ll find something here that would make a great gift.

Beer Smith – Take the guesswork out of homebrewing with Beer Smith’s software. They also have excellent blog articles and podcasts about beer in general.

Joel Traylor Art – Ok, I’ll confess I’m biased. I’ve known Joel for years and have several of his art pieces up on the walls of my office and home. He has a great eye for color and shape – check out the whole gallery to see what I mean.

Irritant Gear – Safety Third. ‘nuff said.

Note on Advertising: After experimenting with Google-ads and a few other ad networks I realized that most of them suck — because they encourage bloggers and companies to waste time on SEO keywords and other nonsense instead of content and product value. Thankfully, I came across the Blogads network, which lets companies pick exactly what sites they want to market to, and lets me filter out spam ads and other tacky crap I don’t want on my site. I suppose it’s a bit old school advertising, but it works very well for me.

So, if you would like to advertise on Chart Porn and reach an audience of smart, creative, tech savvy, inquisitive people for as little as $10/week, click on the box below:

On the other hand, lingering guilt from doing this will likely motivate me to work harder and make further improvements to the site.

2nd Place: “The Compare-o-Tron” by Sam Freund.  Sam took an empirical look at the issue by charting the google-hit correlation percentages of any three terms you enter. The below chart is just one example of the kinds of comparisons you can do.

Congrats to Ashley and Sam and thanks for your entries!

Prizes up for grabs:

1st place: $250
2nd place: Copies of all four Edward Tufte Hardcover books (1,2,3,4)
3rd place: A copy of John Wade’s “How to Design Cool Stuff”, and the “Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics”.
4th place: A copy of Matt Taibbi’s “The Great Derangement”.

Details and rules.

Prizes:
1st place: $250
2nd place: Copies of all four Edward Tufte Hardcover books (1,2,3,4)
3rd place: A copy of John Wade’s “How to Design Cool Stuff”, and the “Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics”.
4th place: A copy of Matt Taibbi’s “The Great Derangement”.

Note: Several of the designs may also be displayed/distributed in Washington DC at the October 30th Rally to Restore Sanity/Keep Fear Alive event.

Description:  Create an infographic that compares different economic and/or political systems.

I’m leaving it completely open to the designers to decide how they want to organize it, how snarky to make it, what political or economic terms to include, and how to do the comparisons. But here are some suggestions to get you started: What are the systems’ defining attributes? How stupid do you have to be to confuse these issues? What are the worst examples of why this is bad (Stalin/Hitler/Pol pot)? Include odd little known relevant facts (health care isn’t free in China/number of people Stalin had killed/tax increases that led to original tea party)? Why it is incorrect  to use this label for the United States? Which are economic systems vs political systems or both? Different formats?: maybe a double sided reference card (one side economics, one politics) to hand out to tea party protesters? A flowchart for identifying differences? Heck, if you want to, go ahead and create an infographic showing how Obama really is all of these things at the same time. In other words: get creative.

Deadline for Submissions: October 15, 2010.

Judging: All prizes will be awarded based on my completely subjective opinion as to which are the best designs.

Technical submission requirements: Submissions should be in Illustrator, Photoshop, or PDF format and must be emailed to dustin@chartporn.org. (If you do something really wacky like a video or interactive tool, get in touch and we’ll work it out.)

Detailed contest rules: Read them here.

Confession: this contest was partly inspired by Adam Sacks’ below design:

note: The inclusion of the above books as prizes in no way indicates the authors’ endorsement of this contest – they are just great books that I thought would make great prizes.

If you go to the Facebook page and click on the “like” button, new posts will show up in your newsfeed.

Update: 3/12 — Everything should be working fine now. Let me know if anyone encounters problems.

Here’s a great chart on twitter trend lifecycles.