Mike started and finished the talk with an in-depth look at the motivations, technical details and social issues surrounding the site, which you can read about on his blog. In the middle I gave a brief overview of related projects and talked about the how the site sits alongside our other mapping work at Stamen. Mike suggested I use a reverse-chronological narrative structure that he liked from a book about Polish history, so I started with the stuff we've finished recently and working back to Stamen's early work with MoveOn and Mappr.

Mike has since reprised the talk for the journalism school, and the whole hour is up on Youtube (part 2 here) if you have time to watch it. Alternatively, you can attempt to simultaneously read the full version of this post and Mike's post together to get a wordier overview of what we talked about.

[At this point Mike has briefly introduced the Oakland Crime site and flash map, and hands over to me for related projects and studio context]

(more...)

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!

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.

• 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?

Here's one that Mikel just pointed out from a recent mapping party in Mumbai:

Does anyone know what image was here before it was removed? I wish the attribution link was working!

Update: thanks to the unique filename and unusual size, Mike and I are pretty sure it's this image he found here (and they found here).

Update II: Karen Kurycki clarifies in the comments. Thanks Karen!

So:

Modest Maps is a BSD-licensed display and interaction library for tile-based maps in Flash (ActionScript 2.0 and ActionScript 3.0) and Python...

...And Processing

(more...)

I'm reminded of my reaction to the wall of statistics about the world before and after Bill Clinton's presidency, at his library in Little Rock, Arkansas. We're told that among other things the national debt, the number nuclear warheads and world poverty all went down, but that AIDS increased. I'm led to believe that nuclear warheads prevent AIDS, or possibly that AIDS prevents nuclear warheads. Clearly.