pushandplay_newsfeed on soup

a data visualisation tool which tries to analyze the debate sparked by the BBC White season of programs which aired on BBC2. the interface shows a number of particles floating around in space. each particle represents a sentence taken from the debate & is assigned a color corresponding to the type of emotion (i.e. anger, fear, hurt, confusion, happiness & caring) word found in the sentence.

particles also have a size which reflects the intensity of the emotion expressed & a brightness which indicates the average consensus (agreement/disagreement) on the comment. comments can be spatially clustered by their attributes & particles can be filtered to show exactly what the user would like to see at any given time.

an online tool for generating beautiful “word clouds” from user-provided texts, such as plain text files or del.icio.us tags. the clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. users can tweak their clouds with different fonts, layouts & color schemes. users can also print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with friends.

unlike a normal tag cloud, Jonathan Feinberg’s uses the interior space of the words & letters… the result is simple but beautiful.

an online visualization of the linguistics relationships in the continuous stream of Twitter data. the graph takes the latest 100 tweets for a specific Twitter ID or term of interest, & then creates a list representation of arcs connecting those messages sent to the same users or that use the same primary term. users can click on the left side to load the tweets for a new user, on the right side to load the tweets for a specific term, & in the middle to visit the actual tweet. 

a stop-frame animation mimicking a graphic equalizer.

a mobile phone application, freely distributed for Symbian phones, that visualizes personal mobile communication usage patterns. the application sits on the periphery of the machine, monitoring the connectivity through the number & type of calls received, & then subtly displaying those in the form of a generative graphic. “some days will be really colorful & wired, others quieter & more reflective, either way the resulting visuals will always be personal, unrepeatable & unique.”

each new contact (phone number) in a cycle is assigned a color throughout a cycle. a color transparency mirrors the level of a call’s intensity, measured by how long one takes to attend the call. duration. the size of a call symbol, full circles: incoming calls, open circles: outgoing calls, expresses the duration of the call.

a collection of about 1,890 graph drawings of matrices in the University of Florida Collection. each of the datasets, here sparse matrices is viewed as the adjacency matrix of an undirected graph, which is laid out by a multilevel graph drawing algorithm. if the graph is disconnected, then the largest connected component is drawn. the largest graph in this collection has 8,863,287 vertices & 44,185,251 edges.

A Mitsui Fudosan Residencial website featuring interviews of people who live in Mitsui realestate. The project aims for, through the voices of actual residents, a positive review of a Mitsui living.

an alternative visual interface to browse through all the information & talks from TED talks: inspired talks by the world’s greatest thinkers & doers. TED sphere offers a ‘different’ way to enjoy this rich knowledge while highlighting the relations between the talks’ content.

videos are presented in- or outside a 3D globe & can be searched by content tags.

Adobe is jumping head first into web-based software this evening, announcing the launch of several new services at Acrobat.com. The launch essentially moves Adobe’s traditional strengths of document creation and management software (Acrobat / Adobe Reader) into an online environment, allowing users to create, manage, and share Adobe documents through an account at Acrobat.com – for free and over the Web

At the heart of the new launch is Buzzword, the web-based word processor that Adobe acquired last year. Buzzword’s full functionality is integrated into Acrobat.com, allowing users to create documents and collaborate on them with others. Different permissions can be assigned to each collaborator, and edits all tracked and saved with version control. Of course, since this is all done over the Web, these documents can be accessed by anyone from anywhere – a big shift from the days of emailing documents back and forth – much like what Google is attempting to do with Google Docs, and Microsoft with Office Live Workspace.

Along those lines, Acrobat.com includes a number of sharing features that move things away from the inbox and onto the Web. Documents uploaded to Acrobat.com can be shared via a URL, and rather than offering a downloadable file, they load in the browser via Flash. These flash files can be embedded on any web page – hence bringing Adobe into direct competition with startups Scribd and Docstoc who were previously “PDF killers” of sorts. Of course, if you’d like to just create standard PDFs, Acrobat also includes a conversion tool where you can upload your documents and have them turned into PDFs.

Beyond document sharing, Acrobat.com is also offering web-based conferencing, a lightweight version of the products offered by WebEx and Microsoft Office Live Meeting. Meetings allow the presenter to share their desktop on-screen, and let participants can chat and interact over VoIP. Dubbed Adobe ConnectNow, Adobe says the service is initially being targeted at individual professionals and small businesses.

Much like competitors Google and Microsoft, it’s hard to call Acrobat.com a total replacement for desktop software at this point – but it’s a big and aggressive move in that direction. The business model is clearly pay-for-what-you-use; while right now the service is just a free beta, restrictions on things like file space and number of users will presumably be addressed by monthly subscriptions – moving Adobe from a licensor of desktop software to a web-based software-as-a-service company. We’ve already seen that with Photoshop Express, and with Acrobat.com, Adobe now has all of their major applications available in a Web-based version too.

AIR is a public, social experiment in which people are invited to use an air monitoring devices to explore their neighborhoods and urban environments for pollution and fossil fuel burning hotspots. Participants are able to see pollutant levels in their current locations, as well as simultaneously view measurements from the other AIR devices in the network.

An on-board GPS unit and digital compass, combined with a database of known pollution sources such as power plants and heavy industries, allow carriers to see their distance from polluters as well. The AIR devices regularly transmit data to a central database allowing for real time data visualization.

A project that is said to have been in the works for roughly two years, Viewzi, is a visual search utility - or “platform,” as its engineers prefer to call it - which just recently transferred to beta stage. Don’t let that tag deceive, however. Despite its semi-private beta status, Viewzi already looks quite well developed. How good? Well, its gorgeous, really.

Juxtapose it against what Mountain View provides you today, and there’s simply no comparison. Google certainly has its algorithmic, all-the-world’s-knowledge strengths going for it. But Viewzi is something so well crafted that you kind of forgive it for not giving you millions upon millions of links. Besides, when do you ever dig deeper than the top 10 or 20? Hardly, I imagine. So, you know, given the average users’ habits, Viewzi can actually do things for you that Google (or Yahoo or Microsoft or Ask) cannot.

Which is essentially to offer you a range of choices on how you’d like your search results presented. Are you perusing the Web for music? You can have Viewzi give you a page full of album covers with links to services like Last.fm. How about photos? Finds on Flickr can be laid out in pleasant order. And on and on go the possibilities. Attractive possibilities, at that.

Now, before I get too carried away here, I should note that there are some things which I would like to see emerge from Viewzi in the future. Firstly, faster image load times. Yes, Viewzi is a graphically-intense environment, which means it cannot accomplish tasks as quickly as more prominent names in search. But a little more umph wouldn’t hurt. Also, though is quite an attractive option already, it would be intriguing to see the service work to more intelligently decipher particular searches and automatically offer a fitting display for certain results, rather than have users regularly choose which is best.

In other words, instead of Viewzi presenting users with a litany of windows to choose from, Viewzi would choose for you. This would likely never be a perfect science, of course. Like everything else, idealism escapes technology, too. But if it could achieve a reasonably level of success in that respect, then, granted that it could scale to serve a massive number of users on a continual basis, it may very well be the next killer search option to emerge onto the scene.

I will attest to the fact that there is a limit to what Viewzi can really provide the broad spectrum of Internet users. For one, I know I won’t be using Viewzi as my main search platform of choice. And chances are you won’t making it an exclusive, either. The potential of Viewzi may be great, but realism says old habits die hard, and if you tend to Google today, you’ll tend to Google for a good many tomorrows to come. But that doesn’t mean you’ll never consult the service. If one were to draw a metaphor for Viewzi, it would be the Porsche Carrera to Toyota’s Camry. It’s an evening or weekend thrill. Something to play with. A new route to take from A to B (and then to C, to D, to E, etc.).

Alright, enough blabber from us. You get the idea. Viewzi is a gem, but it’s got some behind-the-scenes stuff to work on. Anyhow, Web businesses big and small have such things to contend with all the time, so we can’t be too hard on this one. Besides, it’s just out the gate.

Trulia, a real estate search site which stands among the best in the business and which offers users detailed discovery of properties for sale as well as quite detailed analysis of real estate markets, has launched a new utility called Snapshot, powered by Microsoft Virtual Earth, that overlays housing data atop an interactive map that is nothing short of a visual treat. Once the user specifies a city or town to view, all basic browsing on Snapshot is done via images. The user can grab any area of the map to move it about, just as you would Virtual Earth in its primary setting.  

an algorithmic visual representation of barcodes, of which the numerical codes determine the positions, curves & colors of Bezier curves in a tree structure. the number of curves varies in correspondence to the number of figures in the code. in addition, information details of the country of origin, manufacturer, product number & sum are displayed.

the NYTimes seems to churn out high-quality data visualizations faster than I can blog them.

a network visualization linking different diseases, represented by circles, to the genes they have in common, represented by squares. each circle represents a disease or disorder & is scaled to the number of genes associated to that disease.

this map improves the understanding of the causes of disease & of the functions of particular genes. for instance, two genes have recently been found to influence the risk of both diabetes & prostate cancer.

You start off be entering a tag such as a city name, color, or a myriad of other possible tags (I started off with “Tokyo” as it is my favorite city to visit), and once you click “Go”, the magic and fun begin. You are whisked away to what looks to be a star, surrounded by “planets” that represent complementary tags. If you’re happy with your initial search, you can just click the star and you will be zoomed in to a globe that quickly populates with images related to that tag, but if you click on one of the planets, you’ll zoom into a specific set of image results associated with one unique tag. Drilling down to that that sphere brings you to another galaxy cluster centered with a star and even more orbiting planets. You don’t necessary have to view pictures. The visual treats preceding any image browsing are enough to wow you.

Once you have the globe you want filled with pictures, you can rotate it until an image catches your eye. Click it once and it will expand, click it again and it will grow even larger and display the description of the image from Flickr, along with a link to go to that images page on the photo sharing site. Click the “X” in the top right corner to make the image go back to the globe and to let you continue your browsing.

an interactive visualization dashboard of recent statistics from MotoGP, the premier motorcycle road racing championship. the project explores different means of viewing to provide a novel way to understand the championship, individual races & the interrelationships between riders, manufacturers, tires & teams. users can drill down into each race to explore different visualization of lap graphs, gap differences by lap, lap times & average speeds. these details can then be cross-referenced by tire, manufacturer & lap time data.

an interactive geographic map conveying the relative gas prices within the US. areas are color coded according to their price for the average price for regular unleaded gasoline. there is also a map for Canada. not sure of the US, but any Australian version should be dynamic. petrol prices here change according to the day of the week.

A campaign website in the occasion of Uniqlo’s London Flagship Store opening. Users from around the globe simultaneously access the website to generate, delete, move and rotate the Uniqlo logo. There is a virtual game-like quality where the users share moments of real time, an interactivity loosely hinting at how Uniqlo expands its existence around the world.

a visual representation of one’s Twitter network, distributed over a circle, similar to ludios circular network graph,

there seem to be plenty of twitter stream visualizations out there, although only one has been blogged here before.