Random Etc. Notes to self. Work, play, and the rest.

Archive for April 2008

Data Visualisation Blogs You Might Not Know About

In Weblog on 16 April 2008 tagged Blogs, information-visualisation with 37 comments

A quick thanks to Nathan Yau for the plug over at Flowing Data...

I tried to add a comment there with some blogs I subscribe to (some already mentioned, some not) but I suspect the spam filter thought I was nuts to try posting 20 links. So here are a few other blogs/feeds you might like, if you like Flowing Data and came here from there:

• http://infosthetics.com/
• http://flowingdata.com/
• http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/
• http://benfry.com/writing/
• http://www.formfollowsbehavior.com/
• http://dd.dynamicdiagrams.com/
• http://blog.many-eyes.com/
• http://datamining.typepad.com/data_mining/
• http://simplecomplexity.net/
• http://leebyron.com/how/
• http://eagereyes.org/
• http://accuracyandaesthetics.com/
• http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/
• http://diuf.unifr.ch/people/bertinie/visuale/
• http://well-formed-data.net/
• http://www.numberpix.com/
• http://www.mentegrafica.it/blog/
• http://junkcharts.typepad.com/junk_charts/
• http://informationandvisualization.de/
• http://designnotes.info/
• http://perceptualedge.com/blog/
• http://shiffman.net/
• http://abeautifulwww.com/
• http://makingmaps.wordpress.com/
• http://www.bestiario.org/blog/

My colleagues Mike, Eric and Shawn might also blog about info-viz from time to time, at least as relevantly as I do.

And del.icio.us, as ever, is indispensable for finding infoviz blogs.

Who have I missed? Let me know in the comments!

W(e are )here: Mapping The Human Experience

In Processing, Weblog on 14 April 2008 tagged exhibitions, opengl, Processing.org, stamen, trulia hindsight, Videos, Work with no comments

Eric is in Minneapolis at the moment talking about our work at the University of Minnesota. The talk has been in the works for a while but nicely coincides with W(e are )here, and exhibition we're participating in organised by Solutions Twin Cities.

We've prepared a special version of Trulia Hindsight for the show, using the experimental version of Modest Maps I made for Processing in February and animating data for around 1 million homes using OpenGL. We're not ready to distribute the data to a wider audience yet, but here's an example animation from the application:

Trulia Hindsight - Twin Cities Edition from Stamen on Vimeo.

Thanks to Jamie from Trulia for getting us the data we needed to present Trulia Hindsight in this way.

Google’s App Engine

In Weblog on 7 April 2008 tagged app engine, Business, Development, google, Web with no comments

Some unstructured thoughts on Google exposing some big web-app hosting infrastructure:

• Obviously using this probably makes you acquisition-friendly and/or more hire-able to Google?
• But does the appearance of a service like this make it more attractive to leave Google? When do those FYIFV T-Shirts come out anyway?
• And if you used to work at Google, and you left, would this style of development be something you'd miss? Would you use a former employer's service as a leg-up in your new gig?
• Have enough people left Google trained in this style of web development to constitute a market segment in their own right?
• Is this a case of programmers commoditising their complements?
• It's probably a good thing that Techcrunch currently has the number 1 match for "google app engine" on Google, right?