88 Studios

YouTube Visualization

YouTube is in the visualization game now - along with Digg. Link here. 

Twittervision & Moma Elastic Mind Exhibition

David Troy's Twitter API project, Twittervision will be opening at the MoMA in New York City on Tuesday as part of a show called Design and the Elastic Mind.

Wow, this show sounds great. Twittervision is cool - i was thinking recently that a more abstract and personal representation might be interesting. Show blurb below and interesting show website at: http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/
http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/exhibitions.php?id=5632

Design and the Elastic Mind explores the relationship between science and design in the contemporary world, comprising more than 200 design objects and concepts that marry scientific research with consideration of human limitations, habits and aspirations.

TextMap

Here's an interesting find: http://www.textmap.com
It scourers news sources, identifies "entities" in these sources using natural language processing and then maps entities to one another.  They narrow the field of inquiry by: news, medical, & business. A snap of their relational network is at left - one of many graphs mapping relationships between entities. Without doing some serious studying of their map key, the visualizations don't add a whole heck of a lot of value. The heat-map visualization may be the only one that makes immediate sense. I wonder if these visualizations require study to be useful or if they just need a talented designer?

liquid browsing UI

A really smart visualization that seems to work fairly well in playing around with it. They mention that they presented it at Apple - wonder why this kind of UI was not selected for iphone...

link: http://www.iverse.org/l2dsspace/index.htm

and http://www.iverse.org/l2dsspace/ml2dss_movie.htm

wish it wasn't Mac only. playing with the demo makes me really want to use it. it seems so smartly done.

Beautiful Visualization

How amazingly beautiful is this?
http://toxi.co.uk/p5/base26/

Great Furniture Site

Just came across this magnificent collection of stunning used furniture for sale.
http://www.1stdibs.com/ - Wish i could afford this stuff...

Reading Notes: Micropayments Critique

From: http://shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html

* many micropayment startups have failed
* "they failed because the trend towards freely offered content is an epochal change, to which micropayments are a pointless response."
* the act of buying anything, even if the price is very small, creates what Nick Szabo calls mental transaction costs, the energy required to decide whether something is worth buying or not, regardless of price.
* b/c everyone is a creator, value of individual chunks of content is much reduced. " Free content is thus what biologists call an evolutionarily stable strategy."

Visual Complexity

I was just turned on to this site: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/ - which has a collection of some of the most beautiful dat a visualizations. It's a Tufte lover's paradise.

Reading Notes: Search Engines: Intense Competition Drives Better User Experiences

From: http://www.keynote.com/benchmark/new_media/article_intense_competition.shtml

* 85% of web traffic comes from search engines
* in Nov 2007, 10 billion queris in us alone
* avg user does 74 searches/month
* small companies can reap big profit by capturing a small slice
* google 57% of market, yahoo 20%, msn 10% - but competitors are improving
* yahoo still gets more eyes than anyone. 136m uniques, google is 131m
* trend in US for consumers to seek alternatives when there is a market leader
* drivers of search engine success are: home page appeal + search quality
* future is... more of the same, incremental improvements
** targeted search interfaces, satisfying smaller markets

Yahoo!’s Kronthal sees the search function expanding to include the vast sea of user-generated and shared information resources.
“In the future, people will be sharing information on a massive scale,” Kronthal points out, “and we believe that is the next chapter of growth for the Web. We’re looking to tap that valuable knowledge and integrate it into our Web search experience, so that Web search is not just searching Web sites for information, but also delivering the knowledge that individuals have through their collective experiences…We’ll actually be leveraging the knowledge that exists within the one giant social network.”

Audience of 1

I heard someone say recently that there are 75 million blogs and 75 million blog readers. I love that. In fact, at times, I wish that this blog was private - that only I could read it. Not that I don't love you dear reader (I say as if you were there), but sometimes I want to put even more private thoughts down here - even rougher ideas. Yet, I hold back a bit b/c this is public (in theory, assuming an audience). And yet, there is some value in it's publicness (even assuming *no* audience) - it's the possibility of an audience that shifts the writing and motivates ongoing effort.

In my recent book, the publisher and editor greatly enhanced the work. It's much better than anything that you might find here b/c of the structure it offered. I think that the structure of the publicness of this blog enhances it in the same way - when compared with an imagined private blog with no audience.