A Post Entitled Open source, open world
Focus has a great infographic about open source. And not just in software, but culture, business, government, hardware, education, science, medicine and other areas. This would be a great basis for a website.
A Post Entitled The Guardian’s Zeitgeist
The Guardian has just launched Zeitgeist, a prototype index that displays visually what stories on the site are currently getting the most buzz. The blog post announcing it has some interesting explanations of the mechanics behind it:
To start with we wanted to look at how people use the site. A very blunt way to do this is page views, which has its place but isn’t that helpful in this context.
Instead we’re analysing and combining all sorts of things; where people come from, where they go to next, how long they stay on a particular page, if the page is getting passed round twitter and other social websites, number (and rate) of comments and so on.
They’ve done a smart think by keeping archive versions of these pages, not only because they could be interesting to browse in the future, but from an SEO perspective too.I think something similar to this would make for a far more compelling front page, instead of the mile long link-lists news sites seem to favour.
A Post Entitled Google Browser Size
Google Browser Size is a visualization of browser window sizes for people who visit Google. For example, the “90%” contour means that 90% of people visiting Google have their browser window open to at least this size or larger.
http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/
A Post Entitled BBC Interactive map: A decade of road deaths
From the BBC’s Crash feature:In 2008, 2,538 people died on Britain’s roads, on average nearly seven every day. Using official data released by the Department of Transport, this map plots the location of every fatal road crash in Great Britain between 1999 and 2008, a total of 32,298 deaths.
It is also fascinating to explore the infographics:
New drivers aged between 17 and 25 stand out. Passing a driving test does not provide the necessary experience and judgments needed for today’s busy roads. The hourly distribution has high numbers between 10pm and 2am, implying partying, drinking and lower levels of seat belt use.
A Photo
At its atomic level, a cyoa book is a collection of numbered pages of a few different types. Most pages tell a portion of the story, then finish by telling you to jump to another page. A smaller number of pages tell a conclusion to the story and represent an endpoint with no further jumps. We can subdivide these ‘narrative’ and ‘endings’ groups further based on the number of choices offered or the goodness of the ending. To visualize this, imagine color-coding every page in the book and then laying the pages out next to each other.
Choose your own adventure infographics
A Post Entitled Mapumental
I watched a fascinating presentation on mapping technologies and their use in the BBC yesterday. The highlight for me was an amazing video showing all the Open Street Map edits made in 2008. The Channel 4 / MySociety / Stamen project, Mapumental was also demonstrated (well, just the Mapumental YouTube video actually). It’s a really useful tool. Here I’m showing a few Cardiff examples.
A Post Entitled Local crime mapping
This new local crime mapping service is public service on the web done right. You can easily locate your area, compare it to others, download the data as a CSV file and subscribe to updates via RSS.
It is under heavy load right now though.
