Earlier in the year, I had the chance to visit a wonderful interactive exhibition focusing on Japanese food culture housed in a repurposed abandoned building in Nihonbashi, Tokyo. Produced by MOMENT FACTORY, a digital art studio, the exhibit was divided into four installations, telling the story of traditional, seasonal and local cuisine known as washoku (和食). Read more
If you’ve ever visited Hong Kong you will have undoubtably discovered that the city has three distinct, albeit tangled, levels – street level, underground and overground – which can be navigated by pedestrians via a complex network of elevated walkways and underground tunnels that have evolved over the past 50 years. You can literally walk for miles through interconnected shopping malls, office lobbies, train stations, parks and other public/private spaces. Read more
LinkedIn, the social network for professionals (think Facebook, but more serious), has launched a new service called InMaps that visualises your ‘connections’ to other people as a single network graph. I had a play with it earlier and here’s how my network of 163 people who I’ve connected with through work looks like: Read more
Last night I finally saw Inception in the cinema (it only came out this week in China). Like most people I was blow away by the ingenious complexity of the dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream storyline and immediately sat down with a pen and paper to try to work it all out. Below is my attempt to visualise the various levels of the storyline (SPOILER warning): Read more
Continuing my series of quirky videos about Japanese culture here’s a beautifully executed infographic introduction to the country created from a foreigners point of view (by Kenichi Tanaka, a Japanese designer): Read more
To get a sense of what you want to do in life a good place to start is to look at what interests you (and conversely the opposite). This is exactly what I attempted the other day when I basically made a long list of stuff I like. To make things a bit more visual I then thew the list into Wordle which generates pretty “word clouds”. Read more
I came across this fascinating diagram in a 1991 report titled ‘The First Global Revolution‘ from the Club of Rome which is a globalist think tank that deals with a variety of international issues. Read more
For the third year in a row Information Architects Japan have produced a new version of their Web Trend Map (see 2007 / 2008). This year they have surpassed themselves again with a striking new design style based on the Tokyo Metro map. Each trend line on the map is colour coded by industry with each company depicted according to its success and stability. The top 50 influential companies are connected via the “main line” with 111 individual people considered as trend setters also shown clustered around their respective interests (with Steve Jobs, Barack Obama & Eric Schmidt right in the centre at the Emperor’s Palace).
It’s nice to see WordPress (ranked 21) featured as an intersection of the Publishing, Creative & Filter lines with Drupal (ranked 43) situated as its neighbour. Interestingly most of the China web properties (Baidu, Sina, QQ etc.) lie on a branch of the Filter line without any interconnections suggesting that they’re still relatively issolated to that part of the world. Whilst this still the beta version taking a look at it full size is an absolute must – the final version should be released very soon apparently.
I’m thinking I should start some sort of collection to catalogue these types of maps which seem to becoming an increasingly popular form of information visualisation outside their tradition domain of the subway system.
I’m back from Shanghai with lots of posts on the way (super busy city with some amazing architecture) but just stumbled across these wonderful re-imagining’s of Seoul, Tokyo and New York‘s subway systems by Korean designer Zero per Zero which also doubles as a calendar somehow (via JeanSnow). I love this stuff.
Check out what happens when you mouse over the cute logo on their site also (0 / 0).
I have got to buy one of these for my apartment but not sure whether to go for the Seoul or Tokyo designs. Hope they ship to China!
In this age of ubiquitous connectivity there is very little we do which isn’t tracked and stored in some form or another be it active (something we request) or passive (something which is happens automatically behind the scenes). This data is used for a variety of reasons; for marketing, personalisation, recommendation, law enforcement, research, capacity planning, trend analysis, performance enhancement… – the list is almost endless. It spans both our online and offline lives, whether we like it or not, and is becoming evermore sophisticated in its reach and depth.
Being a bit of an analytics junkie I decided to take a look at what all my favourite applications/services offer by way of being able to visualise some of this data –
WordPress blog stats for randomwire.com showing slow but steady traffic increase month-on-month (actual numbers obfuscated). The two mini traffic spikes were caused by exceptionally popular posts (1 / 2).
WordPress comment spam being tracked and auto-deleted by Akismet. Spikes show a targeted attack/flood. 40,683 spams caught and an overall accuracy rate of 99.855%. Petty impressive.
Feedburner RSS stats showing the number of subscribers and reach of the syndication feed (actual numbers removed). Because of the way feeds are ingested and used these stats should only be taken as a guideline at best.
Flickr photo view stats tracking 3,404 items / 13,251 views to date. Difficult to infer anything here but generally I’ve noticed the more metadata you add (especially titles) the more hits you can expect.
Google Reader trends – “From your 86 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 4,858 items, starred 15 items, shared 16 items and emailed 2 items.” Saturday – Monday clearly slow news days in the blogosphere.
FriendFeed activity stats showing a breakdown of top sites from the past 30 days of online activity. Twitter dominant in this group at least but with the ability to re-share and re-tweet these stats may be incestuous.
Wakoopa applications stats showing application usage over the past week equating to an average of 10 hours per day – I really must cut down! Interesting how I’m now using Google Chrome more than Firefox these days.
Google Analytics map overlay showing visitors to the blog from China – most were from Beijing or Shenzhen (where I live) clustered in the more developed east of the country. Unfortunately no readers in North Korea!
Last.fm top artists list artists by the number of times I’ve played their tracks since installing the “audioscrobbler” tracking application. If someone asks me what sort of music I like I just point them here.
Whilst this is all fairly rudimentary it provides some basic insight into some of the data we generate. Already many services provide semi-open interfaces to allow other applications to take data and create mashups and this is likely become more pervasive and easier to do. Personally I just like looking at pretty graphs!