A History of the World in 100 Seconds from Gareth Lloyd on Vimeo.

Many wikipedia articles have coordinates. Many have references to historic events. Me (@godawful) and Tom Martin (@heychinaski) cross referenced the two to create a dynamic visualization of Wikipedia’s view of world history. Watch as empires fall, wars break out and continents are discovered.

This won “Best Visualization” at Matt Patterson’s History Hackday in January, 2011. To make it, we parsed an xml dump of all wikipedia articles (30Gb) and pulled out 424,000 articles with coordinates and 35,000 references to events. Cross referencing these produced 15,500 events with locations. Then we mapped them over time.

More information and datasets: http://www.ragtag.info/2011/feb/2/history-world-100-seconds/

And, while photos can be posted to multiple other social networks, those connections are not visible to other users, putting the focus squarely on photography. On Instagram, who you are is defined only by how you see the world, a refreshing departure from most social networks profiles.

Most people share photos and interact with others through comments and likes. One user, @assingm3nt, innovatively built a community around his account, posting topics for photo contests to his followers and highlighting the most interesting submissions with a followup photo:

Instagram might not have predicted this use case. That’s one of the fun surprises about building something: You never know how users will interact with your product. If you listen, you can find inspiration to improve, or just enjoy the innovation.

I came across this circle calendar template someone created in Google docs. Unfortunately it’s hard to add dates in digitally, but worth finding a printer if you’re doing some long-term planning. Good design can make even the most familiar things more interesting.

I use Google Docs frequently, especially for collaborative projects, and I have what seems like a gazillion of them organized into collections in my account. Many of the docs shared with have long been inactive, but I keep them around because I’ve forgotten they exist. I’m not alone in this habit, and it makes for an interesting data trail.

Social network sharing has quickly become a daily habit for many, but most are self-aware, if not self-censoring, about what they post. We post things we expect an audience to see, whether it’s global or restricted. In a way it’s like performing on stage, where you can gauge audience reactions, often receiving instant feedback and adjusting accordingly.

The social part of “social media” implies that we know we’re being watched, and recognize a few of the faces in the crowd. You can learn a decent amount about a person by their social media activity, but it’s more like watching a rehearsed speech than witnessing an improvised performance.

Over time, the most mundane moments can become the most significant. So much subtle data is stored in emails and shared documents. Those are the interactions we engage in more casually, where we let our guard down more quickly, where more of our core self surfaces. Moments when we forget there’s an audience are what make candid photographs so compelling.

When Facebook relaunched their inbox, I was shown a message I sent five years ago that I didn’t remember composing. What will I have forgotten in 20 years? Services like MemoLane address this question by pulling social media streams into an explorable timeline. It may be fascinating to scroll through timelines made public by people who’ve used social media since childhood (or before, if they have parents who shared their ultrasound on Facebook).

In the Analog Ages, private thoughts to friends and notes to coworkers were communicated via letter or memo. Books of correspondence between remarkable people have been published as insights into who they were and how they thought. Tools like email, chat and shared documents contain a wealth of personal subtleties, habits, quirks and patterns that might not surface so readily our publicly shared statuses. Future biographers will have an impressively overwhelming amount of resources to draw upon.

Photo by Jenny Downing

Data from a day of activity. Note the awkward timing - I was in a different time zone and didn't update my account, another feature that would be better automated.

It goes without saying that I’m a bit of a data geek. I like data recording to be automated, though, so for the past month or so, I’ve been trying out FitBit. FitBit is a small, wearable device that tracks your steps and activity level throughout the day and wirelessly syncs it to an online account for analysis and tracking. In other words, it’s a glorified pedometer.

I like the idea of FitBit’s automation, that with no effort my data is recorded and transformed into aesthetically pleasing charts and graphs. Data visualization rocks, but seeing some data makes me want to see more data.

FitBit encourages this, too. The ‘tracker’ tab lets users log metrics including food, weight, heart rate, blood pressure and glucose. That’s great for people who already keep tabs on these regularly, but it’s not in my nature to be that methodical. I’d love to keep track of any of those data points, but I’m as likely to remember logging them as I am to keep a mental tally of every step throughout the day.

The result is the above dashboard, which calculates the number of calories burned but offers a mere zero for calories eaten and any other data point. Zero isn’t useful and I’d rather not see it if it can’t be tracked automatically.

I’m not alone in craving automation for increased data collection. Were there a tested device that could track these missing data points for me, I’d be thrilled to give it a try. Information visualization is awesome, but zero is a bit of a killjoy. I look forward to more advanced technology that can eliminate the zeros in my data sets.

93 seems like a large number, and highlighting specific contacts makes for a compelling call to action. Kudos, LinkedIn!

Every task seems to be writing oriented – writing the app, writing the site, writing the alert emails the system will send, writing the welcome emails, writing the landing pages, describing the app, blogging about it, emailing contacts about it – the list is endless.

Aside from writing, storytelling, research, organization, clarity and interviewing/reaching out to people who know more than you are also invaluable skills. What else would you add to the list?

Photo by dbdbrobot

Harry, of course, experiences a number of close calls, but what struck me was how he escaped them. Despite  his best efforts, he couldn’t survive on his own but someone from his network always happened to turn up in time to help him.

There are parallels in running a startup. Most founders are unique and possess strong skillsets and tools to launch an idea into a company, but no founder can make it entirely alone. We all need some saving sometimes.

Grooveshark lets you stream on demand from its colossal library, which is perfect for those times you have a song stuck in your head or want to play a tune for a friend. It also has a collection of public playlists, which I often search for generic terms like “jazz” to pull up hundreds of pre-curated options for a quick genre fix.

This is all a digression from the inspiration for this post, which is Grooveshark’s advertising. Lately I’ve noticed the skyscraper ads to the right of the playlist correspond to websites I’ve recently visited. Currently, a New York Times ad occupies the spot and prior to that, I noticed an ad for flight finder HipMunk.

What’s interesting is that I used to see a lot of ads for HipMunk’s competitor Kayak, which I checked to research flights. The ad even included the flight I had searched for the customize the ad with it. I use both services, and happened to visit HipMunk today to show to classmates who hadn’t heard of it.

What I find intriguing is not that Grooveshark follows me around with cookies, but that it surfaces ads of sites I’ve visited recently instead of the sites’ competitors’ ads. I wonder if it would be more effective to show me a Kayak ad after I’ve visited HipMunk since I clearly already know about HipMunk but might be persuaded to try its competitor if the ad is compelling.

Is this on the principle that repetition of a message can make that message more persuasive? Would consumers be compelled by ads for services that compete with the services they already use?  I’m not an expert on advertising, so drop a comment if you have any insight.

Photo by Miusam CK via Flickr