Interview with Frank Jacobs on the power of maps

Map lovers out there will enjoy this interview with Frank Jacobs (of Strange Maps).

The Boom of Social Sites

This infographic shows the relative size of social networking sites chronologically distributed by the year they were launched.

via Stefan Waldeck on posterous

Good Morning Twitter

GoodMorning! Full Render #2 from blprnt on Vimeo.

From Fast Company:
"Twitter is a coming goldmine for data visualization, given all the data it provides. The projects we've seen are still early stage, but Jer Thorp's been one of the best early experimenters. His new project, "Good Morning!" is a visualization of 24 hours of Tweets saying, of course, "Good Morning," from all across the world. Each of the tweets has been color-coded by time--green tweets are early morning, local time; orange occurs somewhere around 9am; red tweets are late morning; and black represents Tweets that are "out of time," meaning that they don't correspond with actual morning hours."

Apple HQ App Store Visualization

I visited Apple headquarters in Cupertino this week and saw this incredible visualization of real-time purchases from the iTunes App Store. Cameras were prohibited, but I found this video online, which gives a sense of what the display is like.

Internet Mapping as Performance Art

See Sara Schnadt's online portfolio for more information about a series of performance art exhibitions she undertook on the topic of connectivity. This image is from a performance piece she did in 2007, described on her site as:

"Two days a week throughout the month of December at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Sara Schnadt constructed a network of string, thread, twine and wire between two maps across the gallery. By connecting these maps - one, a text-array map presenting large quantities of popular internet search terms, and the other, a geographical map plotting internet access around the globe - Schnadt created a low-tech visualization of the world wide web. Using a wide range of found and donated fiber she metaphorically celebrated the many types and sources of content on the web and its publicly accessible, free exchange of knowledge."

via feastoffun.com

Submarine Cable System Infographic

Here's an updated look from TeleGeography at the world's submarine cable system, upon which our internet connectivity relies.

"This map shows 93 of the world's major submarine cable systems, as well as 28 planned systems that are due to enter service by 2011."

MIT's Personas Project

Here's a fascinating new project from MIT:

What is Personas
Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, recently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab (Please contact us if you want to show it next!). It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

How Does it Work?
Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.