Following both the USA and London, the UK government has just released data.gov.uk – a whole tranche of public data free to all, and importantly including commercial applications. A great move in the right direction! Can’t wait to see the output generated from this…

Get your mash-up on now

Visible Tweets is one of the better Twitter visualisations I’ve seen. It is a very soft, very gentle presentation of data. There are 3 different views or animation styles, but to be honest the only one the matters is the rotate one.

As stated by it’s creator The Man In Blue, “[Twitter's] beauty is the cacophony of the masses – a sea of voices that gently washes over you and allows you to savour the zeitgeist in 140 character canapes.” Indeed…

With all the constant buzz about the service, its strikes me as strange that no one has created the ultimate Twitter-viz. No doubt its in the works as we speak, maybe even by yours truly… Anyone want to help?

Brandtags is an absolutely genius idea by Noah Brier (a strategist at Naked). The idea is to chart public – a.k.a consumer – perception of brands via user-generated tags.

Where the project becomes really valuable though is in playing backwards. Here you have to guess the brand, and the tags become a chart of the efficacy of a clear and coherent comms strategy. Those that have got it right are immediately identifiable by a few massive tags. Those unsure of exactly who they are (and obviously have conflicting comms messages) are reflected in a mass of different tags.

Hardly a true and accurate cross-seciton of the population (yet), but nevertheless if i was a brand manager, I’d have this bookmarked and be charting change over time.

Big up to Naked as well, no doubt this idea was hatched on their time ;)

It all started with their collaboration with yugop. And wether you like their generic clothes or not, it seems that Uniqlo cannot put a digital foot wrong.

Their latest site Uniqlo Try is like a questionnaire on too-much protein shake. It uses videos of their customers within a PV3D engine to represent abstract data visualisation – thus making sense of the questions and bringing to life the statistics.

Magnetism in deep space is not the usual subject matter for short films, but Magnetic Movie does a beautiful job of bringing the subject to life. I can’t help thinking how similar this is to data visualisation – bringing out the inner beauty of things are that we cannot see.

My only criticism is that you can’t embed the film, so you’ll have to hit the jump to see it. Please do though, it’s very beautiful.

I never really understood the link between tube map and trends (apart from an easy way to lay out various loosely linked pieces of information), but anyway here is the 2008 version.

Nothing too-crazy / unexpected here. But it is interesting to note the rise of “Karma capitalism”, which only caught my eye because I received an xmas gift in the form of a KarmaCurrency voucher (which I am yet to spend). This in itself is not very interesting. The fact that I got it from my technologically illiterate mother certainly is…

via ad lab

Well, did you? One for the stats and graph boys/girls…

This campaign for Sixt car rentals in Germany, by Jung von Matt, has got to be one of the simplest and smartest campaigns I’ve seen in a long long while. All they did was convert standard word-based text ads into ASCII-based text ads. The result? A 47% increase in clickthrough than before.

Simply brilliant and brilliantly simple. Please not, when I casually drop phrases like “All they did…”, I am of course expecting that you’ve read my recent post on simplicity. It is in no way meant as a degradation to the fine thinking at JvM.

via Martin Cedergren, ECD, AKQA Amsterdam courtesy of adverblog

Based on his simplcity theory #3:TIME, the aptly named timetanium (did you see what they did there? pretty amazing huh?) is Maeda’s first foray into the shoe game. I can’t say I’m in love with the green vomit on the heel, but the grey lines are nice. I can imagine the process of this must’ve been amazing, and unfortunate that the product falls well short in its final execution.

Ever wondered what the flight path of a boomerang looks like? No, me neither. But luckily for us, Eric Darnell did. So he put a bunch of LEDs in one, went out one night and took this rather lovely photo. Pretty cool, no?

via information aesthetics

This is beautifully poetic salary comparison charts the gap between the wages of the CEO and his emmployee’s (in the USA?). A simple change in the scale of heads has never had such dual resonance. Enough to make your blood boil, even if the data visualisation itself is so cute!

via information aesthetics

Not sure how new this is, but news.com has something called ‘hot news’ (the top image) which is essentially a real-time data visualisation of the most popular stories. Definitely the next level above what most news services provide and we’re certainly going to see more of it – that is, ways of visualising the massive amounts of data we’re contantly and increasingly being bombarded with into more easily digestibel byte-sized chunks. I just hope that Marcos Weskamp of the much more elegant original (bottom image) got some financial action out of it!

Not sure if this is by Yugop, but considering his input into the online strategy of Uniqlo of late I wouldn’t be surprised. The Uniqlock is a really interesting study in creating something with seemingly no connection to anything, but doing it so well that its sheer memory-effect reinforces a positive brand image.

A lot like this, according to physicists at Tel-Aviv University. Actually it reminds me of Case, Molly and those nifty chinese army viruses… Written in 1984, William Gibson visualised precisely this in ‘neuromancer’, though with a little less purple from memory, and perhaps not as spherical. But anyway if you haven’t read it you definitely should, cause its a seminal book :)

So the photos are a bit cheesy, but What the World Eats its an interesting visual comparison of the inverse relationship between fresh produce and total expenditure. Interestingly Germany (it must be Germany, the bottles are so neatly arranged) tops out at 500 USD a week for 4 people…

All photos ©Peter Menzel www.menzelphoto.com; from the book Hungry Planet: What the World Eats. Ten Speed Press.

via information aeshtetics

Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait is an aethestic poem on the un-abstraction of statistics (otherwise known as data visualisation). Interestingly, rather than using Flash or some other computer-based methodology, Chris Jordan uses photography.

Above you can see 2x images of the same work, “Prison Uniforms, 2007″. Measuring 10×23 feet in six vertical panels, it depicts 2.3 million folded prison uniforms, equal to the number of Americans incarcerated in 2005. These must be truly amazing at their 1:1 scale…

via newstoday

I’ve just returned from Barcelona – that most beautiful of cities – from the awesomely inspiring OFFF festival (not sure i got enough superlatives in there ;). As usual, there was a plethora of incredible people presenting amazing work that lies mostly on the art side of the art-design divide. There was Maeda, Neville Brody, Flight404, North Kingdom, Graffiti Research Lab and Universal Everything among others. Full run down from my POV will be up by the end of the week.

Personal Pies is a project that abstracts one person’s everyday life into accountable bites/bytes of of information in an attempt to provide “an audit of my life so far”.

I think this is a really interesting idea, and is not at all unlike Feltron’s brilliant personal annual report – although not as well designed. The desire to quantify the minutiae of life in a corporate-esque way speaks volumes of our society and the increasing measure-ability of the world in general.

An interesting project from my home town, The Face of Sydney attempts to “provide a representative male and female “lookâ€? for the 160,000 residents of Sydney’s City of Villages”. 1,000 portraits were taken across an ethnically-true cross-section and then combined to form the average – or generic – face of Sydney.

What’s interesting for me are two things:
1. just how androgynous this generic face is
2. how different the haymarket portrait is (although no surprise considering that’s where chinatown is)

via information aesthetics

One more for the graphic nerds, here is a flickr set of ideo locators – aka “You are here” symbols – from all over the world, as collected by Timo from the previous article. I always was fascinated by that little plane you get to look at only when you’re in a plane…

Ever wondered just how big that new Apple shuffle is? It looks pretty small, right? But just how small is it? Well, if you’re like me and have very little idea of exactly what 0.41 inches means in the real world, then sizeeasy is for you. Its dimensioning made visual. Oh and there’s a nice little comparison of MS’s new Zune against the iPod… Honestly, which muppet is going to by the Zune? I mean, c’mon…

via information aesthetics

Again during my research into data visualisation, I came across this awesome little series of graphs from a star-struck lover somewhere. Very incisive, yet wrapped up in a comedic way. You may snigger, but he’s trying. He’s really fucken trying… Nice one brother! Check it out