Another very interesting visual Twitter-log video, this time demonstrating the volume of certain words throughout the country as various milestones in the Super Bowl occurred:
Map of Popular Super Bowl Words Used on Twitter - Interactive Graphic - NYTimes.com
Edward Tufte would be proud.
A collection of very well written articles looking back at the early days of Macintosh and the significance of Apple (through their first heyday, their almost-demise, and their resurgence) over the past 25 years.
Macintosh is 25 years old today… Happy Birthday!
This is the first time I’ve seen something that made me feel like I could see the way technology and data connect us together since NASA published it’s “Earthlights” image as their Photo of the Day on November 21, 2000:
I finally created a Twitter account the other day, but since I have a pretty dumb phone, using Twitter isn’t much of an experience for me yet. I get most of my microblogging satisfaction from Facebook at this juncture. But, the Twitter phenomenon really intrigues me as a point of social moment and also as an evolution of business and marketing. I’ve been reading a lot about it, and it really fascinates me.
Those who know me well know that I’m a fan of the work of Edward Tufte (author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Yale University Professor Emeritus of Information Design, among other things). So, seeing inventive ways of telling a story with data always excites me. In watching this short video tracing Twitter “tweets” through the day preceding, of, and after President Obama’s Inauguration, where the tweets have the word “inauguration” in a positive context, I feel like I’m seeing a storytelling technique of such genius as I’ve never seen before. Now, certainly this is a video, meaning that the display of the information incorporates the dimension of time as a primary component of the display, so comparing it to amazing, static demonstrations of displaying quantitative information is not apples to apples. But nonetheless, I am floored by the story this simple display tells. I feel like the Information Age has truly arrived.
A brief while after the event itself took place, we can visualise the social consciousness of a nation and a world collectively focusing on the event and its significance. Talk about Collective Soul. I’m a staunch Individualist, but this captures the essence of Obama’s vision of people investing in something larger than themselves in an aptly poetic way.
This video is hosted at Flowing Data, a site dedicated to the visualisation of data. Here’s an excellent article on what they consider to be “the best of” that field for last year.
I remember back in 2004 when my ex-wife and I were interested in using our spare time and the Internet to make a few extra bucks: the only thing out there seemed to be Surveys: you sign up for a service and you get links in your inbox for surveys that you get a little cash to take: apparently the more you participate, the more (and better) links you’d get. I didn’t spend much of my time looking into it, though my ex actually got some credit at her favourite online stores as a result, but still… not sure if it was worth our time.
Another friend of ours had actually got a lot of free stuff clicking on links and whatnot.
But It seemed to me that there should have been better opportunities out there. All that at-home brain-power, and nothing to use it on. Surely there were plenty of menial but non-automateable tasks out there that could be farmed out in exchange for a little cash for the trouble? I think of the distributed networking via Internet that was so popular in the late 90s (SETI@Home being the most noteable example): where the idle time of personal computers could corporately be put to work on big problems.
Why not the same with all that idle brain power?
Well, Jeff Bezos at Amazon apparently thought the same thing not long after I’d pondered (and forgotten about) it: Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Salon wrote a better article than I could hope to, so I’ll direct you there for the full scoop. But the interesting points are this: people actually do use the site to farm out non-automateable work for very little cash (to them) and a thriving community of “turkers” have swarmed to meet the demand. It’s generally for folks who want to use their idle time to make just a little bit more money, not folks really looking to substantively bolster their incomes. Many see it just as a diversion–likened to doing the crossword, but getting a little cash for doing it.
What I found most interesting about the whole thing is not the notion that it’s a way for companies to get around wage laws or that the concept is little more than artificial artifical inteligence (human brainpower) as a service, but rather a thesis someone wrote about the idea of leveraging individual humans to each do something incredibly trivial to accomplish something large: he had over 10,000 people draw a picture of “a sheep, facing left”. The sheep came in at a rate of 11 and hour, and after 40 days, he had 12,000 sheep drawings. He now sells them in batches of 20 for $20! The site where he sells them (The Sheep Market) is lovely and surreal. I’d really like to read his thesis, though.
Great video with slick monotone vector-based animation providing a fairly comprehensive history of the Internet infrastructure:
I’ve always loved understanding the history of staple institutions that have had a huge impact on the present but which we currently take for granted. Back in 1999, I read a couple of books about the development of the personal computer industry. Accidental Empires was my favourite because it touched on the seminal works of so many influential companies (Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Xerox PARC), although Apple Confidential was a little saucier.
I love reading about old microchips and processor speeds and the release of products (or even advertising) that revolutionised the word; the humble beginnings that begat monumental ahievement. Looking back with hindsight, we think of those early contemporaries and the feats the took on, the journeys on which they would embark. I chuckle smugly, thinking, if those folks only knew what they were starting. But then again, I think that they must have. I don’t believe it was really all that accidental.
Any kind of “Early Days” retrospective I find interesting. This short video is no exception. It’s extremely well produced and thorough in its facts. The only problem with it is where it stopped. It ended with the existence of the infrastructure, but there are so many other stories that can be told: details on how the Internet was first used by academic institutions, bulletin board systems, and then later pay services; then the rise of ISPs, and then the web; the introduction of companies like Netscape, Yahoo, Google, the dot-com boom; and then the subsequent true usefulness of all this technology culminating into a social phenomenon, the world connected–Wikipedia, YouTube, social networking, etc.
There’s so much to this story, and I can only imagine how informative and engaging it would be if presented by this visual story teller. Well done.