Japan – The Strange Country
Continuing my series of quirky videos about Japanese culture here’s a beautifully executed infographic introduction to the country created from a foreigners point of view (by Kenichi Tanaka, a Japanese designer): Read more
Things That Interest Me
To get a sense of what you want to do in life a good place to start is to look at what interests you (and conversely the opposite). This is exactly what I attempted the other day when I basically made a long list of stuff I like. To make things a bit more visual I then thew the list into Wordle which generates pretty “word clouds”. Read more
The First Global Revolution?
I came across this fascinating diagram in a 1991 report titled ‘The First Global Revolution‘ from the Club of Rome which is a globalist think tank that deals with a variety of international issues. Read more
Web Trend Map 2009
For the third year in a row Information Architects Japan have produced a new version of their Web Trend Map (see 2007 / 2008). This year they have surpassed themselves again with a striking new design style based on the Tokyo Metro map. Each trend line on the map is colour coded by industry with each company depicted according to its success and stability. The top 50 influential companies are connected via the “main line” with 111 individual people considered as trend setters also shown clustered around their respective interests (with Steve Jobs, Barack Obama & Eric Schmidt right in the centre at the Emperor’s Palace).
It’s nice to see WordPress (ranked 21) featured as an intersection of the Publishing, Creative & Filter lines with Drupal (ranked 43) situated as its neighbour. Interestingly most of the China web properties (Baidu, Sina, QQ etc.) lie on a branch of the Filter line without any interconnections suggesting that they’re still relatively issolated to that part of the world. Whilst this still the beta version taking a look at it full size is an absolute must – the final version should be released very soon apparently.
I’m thinking I should start some sort of collection to catalogue these types of maps which seem to becoming an increasingly popular form of information visualisation outside their tradition domain of the subway system.
Universal Railway Maps
I’m back from Shanghai with lots of posts on the way (super busy city with some amazing architecture) but just stumbled across these wonderful re-imagining’s of Seoul, Tokyo and New York‘s subway systems by Korean designer Zero per Zero which also doubles as a calendar somehow (via JeanSnow). I love this stuff.
Check out what happens when you mouse over the cute logo on their site also (0 / 0).
I have got to buy one of these for my apartment but not sure whether to go for the Seoul or Tokyo designs. Hope they ship to China!
Digital Footprints
In this age of ubiquitous connectivity there is very little we do which isn’t tracked and stored in some form or another be it active (something we request) or passive (something which is happens automatically behind the scenes). This data is used for a variety of reasons; for marketing, personalisation, recommendation, law enforcement, research, capacity planning, trend analysis, performance enhancement… – the list is almost endless. It spans both our online and offline lives, whether we like it or not, and is becoming evermore sophisticated in its reach and depth.
Being a bit of an analytics junkie I decided to take a look at what all my favourite applications/services offer by way of being able to visualise some of this data -
WordPress blog stats for randomwire.com showing slow but steady traffic increase month-on-month (actual numbers obfuscated). The two mini traffic spikes were caused by exceptionally popular posts (1 / 2).
WordPress comment spam being tracked and auto-deleted by Akismet. Spikes show a targeted attack/flood. 40,683 spams caught and an overall accuracy rate of 99.855%. Petty impressive.
Feedburner RSS stats showing the number of subscribers and reach of the syndication feed (actual numbers removed). Because of the way feeds are ingested and used these stats should only be taken as a guideline at best.
Flickr photo view stats tracking 3,404 items / 13,251 views to date. Difficult to infer anything here but generally I’ve noticed the more metadata you add (especially titles) the more hits you can expect.
Google Reader trends – “From your 86 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 4,858 items, starred 15 items, shared 16 items and emailed 2 items.” Saturday – Monday clearly slow news days in the blogosphere.
FriendFeed activity stats showing a breakdown of top sites from the past 30 days of online activity. Twitter dominant in this group at least but with the ability to re-share and re-tweet these stats may be incestuous.
Wakoopa applications stats showing application usage over the past week equating to an average of 10 hours per day – I really must cut down! Interesting how I’m now using Google Chrome more than Firefox these days.
Google Analytics map overlay showing visitors to the blog from China – most were from Beijing or Shenzhen (where I live) clustered in the more developed east of the country. Unfortunately no readers in North Korea!
Last.fm top artists list artists by the number of times I’ve played their tracks since installing the ”audioscrobbler” tracking application. If someone asks me what sort of music I like I just point them here.
Whilst this is all fairly rudimentary it provides some basic insight into some of the data we generate. Already many services provide semi-open interfaces to allow other applications to take data and create mashups and this is likely become more pervasive and easier to do. Personally I just like looking at pretty graphs!
I ♥ MTR
It’s no secret that I love system map design. There’s something intrinsically beautiful in being able to represent a complex network of lines, interchanges and stops in a simple map which just about anyone can easily follow. As I found out last weekend Hong Kong doesn’t have a huge metro system but it does have a very nice map which concisely represents both the lines and the land masses which it spans (encompassing two islands and soon to be connected to mainland China) as well as providing duel language labels (Cantonese and English).
It appears to be based on the same design principles as employed to create the original London Underground map but has so far avoided the pitfalls which have ruined its older counterpart. They seem to have found the perfect balance between providing not enough information and just enough.
If you like this sort of thing you may be interested to see that the 2002 classic “Atlas of Cyberspace” book which chronicled the history of visualisualisation and the design of maps which explored the digital landscape has now be released under a Creative Commons licence as a free PDF download. I remember first reading this book when I was at school and being fascinated by the amazing new world it depicted. Although some of the content is now a little dated it’s well worth a read, if only for the amazing pictures! [via]
Signal Patterns
Many years ago when I was at school we were made to take fairly crude psychometric tests (I think one was Myers-Briggs) in order to supposedly help us find what career we might like and understand our personality traits. I never found them particularly helpful and have always thought of the field as rather lacking in credibility.
I also usually disdain online quizzes so it was with an air of dubiousness that I tried out Signal Patterns Personality Patterns survey which aims to help “people develop a deeper understanding of their personality and preferences. By fostering self-discovery and expression, Signal Patterns gives people new ways to make powerful connections to the world around them.” They claim to have some solid research underpinning the way in which the it can infer connections between personality, behaviour and preferences so I took the test, taking about 10 minutes to complete, by asking how much you feel a set of statements are like you.
At the end it outputs an interactive chart (mine above) which you can then use to examine your traits in more detail. Apparently I’m Independent, Private, and Conscientious which surprisingly accurate and in general seems to have done a good job of profiling me. You can also take this one step further by linking the results to your Facebook profile to facilitate comparison between friends and finding “people like you”. I’ve not tried it myself yet but could be interesting. At the very least it’s a cool way of visualising your personality!
P.s. I have invites if anyone wants them – just leave a comment below.
Wordle Cloud
Whilst being more of a toy than having any tangible application Wordle is a cool way of generating “word clouds”. Words are given more prominance depending on how many times they occur in the source text. I generated the cloud above using tags from my blog – simple but effective.
Did You Know?
I love this. Although it’s rather US centric there’s some great info-viz with some fairly thought provoking questions in there. The way in which the world has changed over my short lifetime is staggering already, it’s even more amazing to imagine where it will go and be the ones to take it there…