Visualisation of Information Quantity
The current issue of Wired features a portfolio of different artistic visualizations of quantitative information of a text. The thirteen different projects range from virtually created sculptures derived from blog text over the visualization of US census data into abstract colorful walls to the visualization of logs from last.fm. The projects are inspiring design and visualization approaches. One of my favorites is Textour from Tim Walter, which visualizes different quantitative aspects of a given text.
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Autodesk TED BigViz
I'm a big fan of TED conference talks. In most cases the presenter are very smart people, which know how to tell a story and make inspiring presentations. My favourit talks include Hans Rosling talk about "Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen, Golan Levin about "The truly soft side of software", Joshua Prince-Ramus about "Designing the Seattle Central Library", Seth Godin about "Sliced bread and other marketing delights", John Maeda about "Simplicity patterns" or Jonathan Harris on "The Web's secret stories".
In this years TED conference AutoDesk made a technology experiment called BigViz. The experiment is an exploration in the visualization of the Big Ideas presented on the TED conference. David Sibbet and Kevin Richards, two visual cartographers, captured more than 700 sketches highlighting memorable quotes, great questions and unexpected connections. All this was done on wacom tablets and transfered simultaneously to the Autodesk BigViz system for later exploration. The BigViz system is an interactive system that allows to record scratches and work on them in a visual collaborative environment, which can be used intuitively. Combined with a multitouch display, the system demonstrates how future collaboration could look like. The visualizations are also available as 200 pages pdf download.
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Skews and Blews
Microsoft Research will present another interesting research project at the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media 2008 (ICWSM). Blews (blogs and news) is a another tool to visualize blog topics in the political part of the blogosphere. Therefore it categorizes and visualizes blog topics 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. The data is aggregated in real time from Live Microsoft Labs Social Media platform and consist of a link analysis and text analysis of political blog posts.
I am very interested to read how the authors of the paper define the emotional charge of a discussion.
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Microsoft Research Report on IM usage
Microsoft Research just released a very interesting research report "Planetary-Scale Views on an Instant-Messaging Network" on the usage of Instant Messenger Usage. The anonymized study analyzed 30 billion conversations among 240 million people, from which a communication graph with 130 million nodes and 1.3 billion undirected edges has been constructed. The data for the analyzed dataset was gathered within 30 days in June 2006 and includes three main data sets:
- user demographic information
- time and user stamped events describing the presence of a particular user
- communication session logs
which have been used to conduct the analysis.
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What to choose for developing a Rich Internet Application?
Lately I became very interested in the different choices for developing Rich Internet Applications (RIA). Although I followed the different announces of the various technologies I didn't put much effort in having a big picture of the different approaches. As I am now looking for some stable development libraries and frameworks for rich user interfaces I put together a short overview of the various options.
