Just found out about Political Streams.
I really do like this idea, but reinventing the pie chart with those desaturated squares is not a good start. I’ll be checking it out to see how they iterate on representing the concept, which is fascinating.
It mines information from all the blogs and Web sites out there, and all on one screen, lets you see the relative popularity of any given story, whether it’s trending up or down, and tracks the number of mentions of the people and places mentioned in the story.
The graphs, by contrast are wonderful and straightforward:
oh and cf. Microsoft Blews (TM) which has similar data (and infoviz problems).
While typical news-aggregation sites do a good job of clustering news stories according to topic, they leave the reader without information about which stories figure prominently in political discourse. BLEWS uses political blogs to categorize news stories according to their reception in the conservative and liberal blogospheres. It visualizes information about which stories are linked to from conservative and liberal blogs, and it indicates the level of emotional charge in the discussion of the news story or topic at hand in both political camps. BLEWS also offers a “see the view from the other side” functionality, enabling a reader to compare different views on the same story from different sides of the political spectrum. BLEWS achieves this goal by digesting and analyzing a real-time feed of political-blog posts provided by the Live Labs Social Media platform, adding both link analysis and text analysis of the blog posts.
Smartly presented information is a nonprofit’s best friend. If you can’t communicate the problem, no one is going to give a damn. Hash’s blog just pointed me to some powerful charts Sokwanele mapping project , which I’ve mentioned previously. These charts are extremely important data to have in the public domain, and it’s great that they
appear well-executed and polished, with a high resolution of visual information.
Google Charts from Sokwanele and Mobile Researcher
The charts at Mobile Researcher also caught my eye recently (also pictured, at right and bottom). Turns out they were both made with Google Charts. I hadn’t used it before, but I recognized their densely set labels and had some vague ideas that there was a Ruby wrapper. And I just thought that the Mobile Researcher charts were really beautiful. Turns out it’s super easy. There are plenty of libraries for managing the requests to the API, and, in some simple cases you can even code it by hand, since all of the code is simply passed through a query tag on an image url.
What it does do is proved fodder for organizations inside and out to make an even stronger case against this repressive regime.
- Erik Hersman @ whiteafrican.com
But in most of the cases the data is hashed somehow with javascript, since urls can only be so long. Since I was working in a Rails app, I used a great ruby library and was up and running very quickly. I wholeheartedly recommend them anytime you need simple, sharp graphics to illustrate your research. If you have a web app or with dynamic charts, it’s a no-brainer, since generating images is relatively intensive memory-wise.
All this is to say that something like this:
< img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chd=t:6,2,6,4,2,4,7,3,4,2,3,4
&chco=0077CC&chs=120x40&cht=ls" />
Turns into this:
Or you can abstract the access to make it easier with a library like this with a method like this:
#usage
google_pie('val1', 'val2', 'val3')
#method
def google_pie(*args)
size = "250x100"
url = "http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?"
return < img src=\"#{Gchart.pie_3d( :background => ‘E9E7DD’, :size => ‘300×80′, :data => *args)} \” />
end
But the API of course is language neutral, and I am sure it would be just as easy in most any language. Oh, and it’s free! (Though capped at 10k charts per day … which would be a good problem to have, I suppose.)
I’ve recently been reading quite a bit about “personal metrics” (aka “attention data”, aka your “information wake”). Pictured are some examples from Last.fm, Nike+ and RescueTime (which I used for a few days this week! My Saturday computing is visualized below.)
As an infoviz junkie, I have to say that I have always *adored* this stuff. But the tonight I heard a very smart person say that, prior to Nike+, collaborative running was impossible.
Wait, really? How did we get to the point that we need a website, an RFID chip, and an iPod to coordinate running with friends?
And, perhaps more importantly, when did we start to forget it was possible otherwise?
Information visualization of this kind exudes authority and direction — it gives you clear goals, measurable output, definitive results. It facilitates competition, reward, efficiency and progress. Sexy, sure. But so does fascism.
In these graphs, I see a kind of quiet aplomb that says, “look, buddy, this infoviz shit clearly says that I know *so bloody much* about what I’m doing, and it’s very likely that I’m doing it all twice as well as you are, sub-aware urchin.”
There’s indeed an air of inevitability about it all, but why?
Is it inevitable that, just because it is possible, that we must practice self-surveillance?
Are we really doing it for ourselves, as a form of personal empowerment? When I use Last.fm to track what I listen to, how much more do I become socially self-conscious, using my playlist for competitive leverage among my peers? Can I become more socially invested in the metrics than emotionally invested in the music?
When I use RescueTime to track everything I do on my computer, how much more efficiency-oriented and self-conscious do I become? Can I become more passionate about my productivity than my job?
And with Nike+, does my daily run become more compelling just because it is more competitive and metrics based? Can I love the satisfaction of the graph more than the outdoors?
Is it possible to be satisfied by the graphs alone? Is it possible to be more concerned with your attention data than to the stuff you’re actually paying attention to?
Recently there has been a lot of discussion among the nonprofit technology geeks about the use (and usefulness) of the tag “nptech”.
When the nptech tag started one of the ideas was to gather enough data to look and see what words people were using to describe, say, open source (open source, floss, foss, open source software) and then use those words to inform a taxonomy. It’s a taken a long time but I bet there’s enough data in the nptech tag on a combination of bookmarking systems to do a little crunching and get at some of those commonly used terms. Sort of an emergent taxonomy… Marnie Webb,
nptech proto-tagger
The nptech tag (on del.icio.us) dates back to December of 2004 and was created by a group of nonprofit technologists that were exploring the potential for social tagging in the community. While I have a “curmudgeonly” eye for Web2.0 gizmos, in addition to a deep distrust of technophilic “progress” … I think that the development of this tag is arguably the single largest reason for the current (thriving I think) state of what is commonly called the “nptech community.” Which means a lot to me.
(A great summary of the current conversation is at Beth Kanter’s blog.)
Opinions abound. Most of us seem to be worked up about the efficiency of the tag. On this note there has been a lot of interesting reaction to a post by Gavin Clabaugh, which was critical of folksonomies. Laura Quinn of Idealware largely agrees with Gavin.
In this context, it seems that generally the consensus has been that 1.) Taxonomies are harder to create than Folksonomies, but they are better in many contexts. And 2.) we need more data about how to make the nptech tag more useful as an “emergent taxonomy”.
So, in the spirit of improving the tag and promoting the nptech community, here’s some data:
- A plain text listing of every word that has been used on del.icio.us in association with nptech. fulltext.xml
- A sorted and ranked list of these tags. nptech-tagged.txt
- All of the tags presented as a scrollable tag-timeline.
- The script that I wrote to gather the data from delicious (in perl): community-tag-robot.txt. (The code is also displayed below with syntax highlighting.)
The script that I wrote crawls the pages of del.icio.us and pulls out all of the tags that were used to describe the same stuff tagged “nptech”. This gives us an idea of how the tag has been used — effectively describing the tagged links, if we assume taggers are using “synonym clouds”. Del.icio.us has a “related tags” feature but it is lame (only 10 are listed), and judging from my initial review of the data it is pretty random. (Not really sure if I broke some terms of use or not with my script, but it’s *our* data, right? And besides, the script is very polite.)
There are a lot of delicious mashupy-type things that show you tagging patterns, but these approaches seem somehow very passive, and not community-oriented. I mean, in general delicious is used very passively — people want to be able *consume* more efficiently, not create some community in which greater action can be taken. Or it is just used for explicitly personal purposes, as a web-based bookmark service.
What I like so much about the nptech tag is that it was intentionally created to support and reflect a community (unlike, say, the tag “nintendo,” which may very well support a community, but it is not active in a self-critical, dialogic way.) And certainly there is a beauty, I think, in using these hyper-technological tools (which have the ability to be very atomizing and consumerist) for the sake of doing things that are explicitly not-for-profit and mission-driven.
And personally I tend to agree with Michelle Murrain that we need to be wary of an “expert” approach to developing our tags and community taxonomies. That line of thinking is what made me want to do this in the first place. (Likewise I need to point out how much I have really been thinking lately about stuff that I have been reading at Ulises Ali Majias’ blog like this.)
Anyway, further experimentation (graphs/charts from excel would be easy using the text files, for instance) would be nice; please let me know if you are doing something interesting with the data. I’m hoping that this will help us, as a community, determine what we want to do with this tag now that we have been using it for more than two years. What patterns do you see in the data? What does the nptech tag mean for our community? I am not going to try to start doing any analysis here, now — but I would really like to hear what people’s reactions to the tag timeline are.
There are still a lot of holes in this data that I could answer with a bit more programming. (i.e., who has been using the tag?) Suggestions for extending the script are welcome. What do we want to know?
Mike Davidson has been working lately on an innovative (I said innovative, not trendy) online news company, Newsvine, that provides articles from mainstream media outlets. The Newsvine team is a well-respected web group, most of them formerly of Starwave, a studious anti-hype third-wave (i.e. late 1990s, post-bubble) internet company. (Here’s Starwave’s startup profile from a 1996 Fast Company article.) Davidson’s also a major contributor to SiFR, which typophiles (that’s typography, not typos) and web developers everywhere love.
The trick of Newsvine is that it comes in a really well designed interface and allows community input, both by linking and commenting. Here’s an extract from a larger rundown at Solutionwatch:
One of the main frustrations of reading normal news sites for me is how they all have cluttered sites with advertisements everywhere, news mixed around, and when I find a story of interest, I can’t even comment about it. Newsvine is the complete opposite and I immediately felt at home with their beautiful interface that allowed me to easily find and read what I am interested in. The design consists of a style that I feel has the unique style of its founder, Mike Davidson. The main page gives a clear overview of all the news submitted from the Associated Press and the Newsvine users, along with buttons to vote and comment on stories (more on this below). “The Wire” being news from sources like the Associated Press, ESPN, and other services. “The Vine” being user submitted content.
Personally, I’m *very* excited to see companies that understand my Sysiphean-Kafkaesque nightmare of flashy, obtrusive, cluttered websites like Yahoo! and all the major news outlets (see image). And of course I’m excited to see (another) community-building website that allows for the development of local folksonomies and scalable collaboration.
I would very much like to start using Newsvine in order to tag and collect news items that are relevant to my organization(s). Considering Newsvine’s focus on usability and design, I think it would be a serious alternative to using something like del.ico.us to share links. Del.icio.us just has such an uber-geeky interface that is seriously off-putting to most warm-blooded nonprofit people. And of course, there are a number of other “social news sites” that are doing something similar to newsvine, including:
http://digg.com
http://www.gabbr.com
http://www.plastic.com
http://www.newsback.com
Digg.com, in my experience, is the best of these and has the largest user base (there are even rumors on the Digital Divide listserv from Phil Shapiro that it will soon be larger than geeky heavyweight slashdot.com. As Phil says: “Community editing of news. Community. Editing.” It’s a huge thing indeed.)
For an example of Newsvine’s potential, look non further than this map (see image), created by Fraser Mills today. In the “tradition” of the best web applications, developers will soon have a Newsvine API (a kind of cookbook for developers, saving lots of time) into which all kinds of fun can be had, and Fraser is just a little ahead of the curve. His map represents news items according to their location. You can click on each country and get a rundown of the news in that area. I imagine that you will soon be able to sort and filter to create some impressive maps of information.
Most impressively, Davidson has written today that an API is in the works and that: “Once true location data like this makes its way into posts, wire articles, and seeds, the map will be even more useful. You’ll be able to zoom in on Seattle, for instance, and get stories down to the micro-local level.”
Now that would be useful.
Newsvine is still in beta and registration is limited. But based on Mike Davidson’s previous work and the projects promising future for collaboration, I’m eagerly anticipating my invitation.
[This post was edited 2/7 to reflect the correction as indicated in the comments section below. Pictr.org regrets the error, as they say. I did get the invite last week. We'll see how it goes.]
Here’s an interesting feature from a nonprofit organization called the gov3 Network, which appears to be a kind of ICT government consultancy. They have a interesting feature on their website that dynamically draws data comparing a country (of your choice) to other countries with regard to their ICT-sector growth.
Put a country and comparison region into this Digital Dashboard, and the result is a data-dense graph that is intended to give governments a sense of how quickly they are moving in the right (or wrong) direction for growing their tech sector.
I think this could be a useful tool, but I’m wary of provate organizations seeking (lobbying?) for “more proper” regulation of the ICT sector as being a thin veil for simply giving opportunity to industry, not people. That said, they have a stated interest in promoting “a people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society.Also, they’ve recently won an award at WSIS for DirectGov, a website that brings together a mess of information about UK government services.
Recently in my commutes to work I’ve been using these incredible flash-based, interactive representations of development statistics. (Don’t worry, I ride the bus.) These modules, created by a Swedish group called Gapminder, are attractively designed and highly educational. I have long been a great fan of sharp design in the interest of development. These are as great a communication tool as I have ever seen.
From the Gapminder website:
“Gapminder is a non-profit venture for development and provision of free software that visualize human development. … It all started in 1998 from an idea to enhance the understanding of world health. We developed prototype software showing time series of health statistics as moving graphics and varying life conditions as 360¬? photo panoramas from homes, schools and health facilities. From the prototype emerged the Dollar Street project with Save the Children Fund in Sweden and the World Health Chart project with WHO. Within the later project Gapminder developed the free software Trendalyzer that turns boring time series of development statistics into attractive moving graphics. “
