In: Humor Internet/tech
10 May 2012Yep. This pretty much describes my career. Progress is the result of a lazy man finding an easier way of doing things.
I looked at this for several minutes before noticing that they never actually say what they’re measuring on the charts. <sigh> ALWAYS LABEL YOUR AXIS!!!
I thought this was a good example of how to use graphics to clearly differentiate a list of similar items – in this case making a choice between 25 different software apps.
In: Internet/tech
26 Jan 2012Ok, there’s not much charting going on here, but there is a whole lot of fascinating data on Google ad revenue, as compiled by search marketing company WordStream. It is stunning what companies are paying per click for some of these keywords. In revenge for years of mediocre service (and because it was fun), I just went and searched for “high speed internet deals” then clicked on Comcast’s ad – supposedly costing them >$20. That’ll teach ‘em!
Design wise, this is pretty good. I might have shrunk (or killed) some of the clipart, made the fonts bigger, and tossed in a bar chart at the top instead of those “kind of looks like a chart but isn’t” ribbons – but overall, it works.
An interesting (ok, quick poll: should I stop calling things interesting? I only post stuff I think is interesting – seems a bit redundant, no?) long term look at new technology. At first look, it’s a bit boring and geeky – but the interactive popup descriptions really flesh it out. It would be easy to quibble about where things fall on the timeline, but overall I really enjoyed reading about all the hypothetical tech. Now that we have realized most of the science fiction from the 1900s, it was nice to see that we still have ways to dream and imagine. (via)
Aesthetically this is obviously quite nice. The roll-over data is snappy quick. The color selection is clear and intuitive. But there’s something about these nested arc charts that I just don’t like – they don’t seem like a very good way to illustrate historical data. It was created as a simple example of the Axiis data visualization framework – which offers several other Flex based graphic tools. (Hat tip to Ryan C for sending this along!)
In: Internet/tech
23 Jan 2012It’s embarrassing how many times I’ve failed to memorize this stuff properly.
(via CoolInfographics)
In: History Internet/tech
19 Jan 2012A brilliant chart of computer sales. Note the log scale!
There’s also an animated version (but I like the static one better):
Here’s a look at the same data in terms of market share:
(via Ritholtz)
In: Culture Internet/tech
22 Nov 2011New research by Facebook based on user friends, reveals that there are not 6 degrees of separation between you and everyone else – but only 4.74. Other interesting tidbits: the distance is shrinking: in 2008 it was 5.28. If you just look at the United States, it’s only 4.
… 84% of all connections are between users in the same country. We also find that people tend to have a similar, albeit typically smaller, number of friends as their neighbors, and tend to be about the same age.
Eric Fischer analyzed twitter meta data for location and language and ended up with a pretty good approximation of the normal geopolitical borders. He chose grey for English, since they speak that everywhere – it would be interesting to see a map of just English. There’s also a world version. (via FlowingData)
In: Internet/tech
1 Nov 2011Ripples is a new visualization feature of Google+ which shows the propagation of posts across different users. Circles within circles indicate resharing. The easiest way to see this is to go into your Google+ stream, select “What’s Hot” from the list on the left, then click on the little arrow in the right hand corner of any post and select “view ripples”. You can click on a timeline at the bottom and watch the post spread, and also see some summary stats about influencers. (and yes, none of my friends are using Google+ much either, which is why this only looks good on public “what’s hot” posts)
Even though the “content limit” is only 140 characters, each tweet actually contains a crazy amount of meta-data. (related Economist article; via The Big Picture)
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