suspicious infoviz of the day

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 [...]

October 9 2008

Visualizing Human Rights with the Google Charts API

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 [...]

June 20 2008

Personal metrics, infoviz porn & productivity obsession

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. [...]

April 11 2008

Understanding a community tag: the history of nptech

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 [...]

January 10 2007

Visualizing Community News

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 [...]

February 1 2006

The Digital Dashboard: Graphing ICT Change

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 [...]

December 19 2005

Beautiful Packaging, Ugly Statistics

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 [...]

December 16 2005