- Have fun playing with bitly’s new Real Time Media Map, which visualizes how content from different media outlets is being consumed across the U.S. As you can see from the drilldown above, we read a lot of The Onion here in Massachusetts.
- Next week Google Analytics opens its free, online Analytics Academy. Another example of MOOCs as the new marketing — and a great opportunity for anyone in digital looking to develop skills in a fast-growing segment.
- Snapchat shifts focus from the fleeting to a full 24-hour window with its move into Snapchat Stories. Users can now construct chains of moments into stories which expire after a day.
- Group messaging service What’sApp is being billed as another great threat to Facebook. Like WeChat, the service has strongholds in multiple markets outside the U.S.
- Twitter disclosed its IPO plans to raise $1 billion revealing both lower than anticipated revenue, and 218 million active users/month. Most significantly, 65% of advertising revenue is now from mobile.
Tag: visualization
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Friday 5 — 10.04.2013
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Try it: News visualized with Topicly
As Flipboard collects another $50M on a $800M valuation, traditional news publishers are experimenting with more visual displays of the news. The Washington Post’s Topicly is largely algorithm-driven, full-bleed display of news stories by volume. Editors plan to incorporate more social media from the web as well as from the Post’s own journalists.
A few observations:
- This is a good example of desktop user interface informed by mobile — see how the three horizontal line icon is rapidly becoming a standard meaning “expand this” on the desktop web.
- More context and functionality in the interface (what do those numbers in the expanded menu mean?) might be helpful to understand what you’re seeing. Is it sheer volume or is there a measure of resonance? Is there any editorial hand?
- Sites like this are tough beasts to feed with visual content: see how some of the images are pixellated when you click through.
- This is a revenue experiment, as well as a visual one. There is a site-level sponsorship at top left in addition to interspersed native advertising. Sites looking for sustainable models will continue to experiment with sponsorship of specific features and functionality, like Citi sponsoring the launch of Quartz’s annotations.
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Try it: Google define
Language is always changing, but the arrival of consumer technology over the past 25 years has meant a sharp uptick in our new day-to-day jargon. Terms like modem, pager, or smartphone enter and exit the common usage with remarkable frequency.
FlowingData this week pointed out how Google’s “define: <word>” feature now displays word etymology via flowchart and graphs word usage over time. Three words graphed over time tell a story of technology adoption and attrition:
You can clearly see where telegraphy emerged in the mid 1800s, and how the flat line begins around the time the last telegram is sent in 2006. Telegram remains in the language as a common noun and as a relatively popular name for newspapers, but the arc aligns with the technology in use.
Next, let’s track fax technology, which clings on doggedly in the finance, law, and healthcare sectors. A sharp rise in the 1990s, but not the subsequent flatline many might assume.
Finally, have a look at tweet:
The word tweet meaning “the chirp of a small or young bird” has been around since at least 1800. You see a minor spike in the 1920s, when Jazz Age musicians produce and record “When my sugar comes down the street, all the little birdies go tweet tweet tweet.” But the real hockey stick spike starts in 2006 when Twitter enters the scene.
As a language geek I love how we can track and quantify language usage in more simple, visual ways. Analyses like souped-up concordances can not only track macro usage trends, but perhaps even diagnose dementia in individual authors. As visualization tools become more common and accessible, we’ll have more ways to analyze and add context to our understanding of the language we use.
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Friday 5 — 07.19.2013
- Game development company Valve continues to think different. This week it launched Pipeline, an experimental project to introduce high school students with minimal experience to the video game development industry.
- Is user experience finally moving beyond the tech domain and being perceived as a strategic business asset? Robert Fabrikant describes how UX is the new black.
- A Pew survey finds that middle and high school teachers believe that students’ use of digital tools encourages creativity and personal expression (78%) as well as greater collaboration among students (79%). Regrettably, this doesn’t always translate into effective writing, and teachers expressed concern about students’ ability to “read and digest long or complicated texts.”
- Readwrite describes how to get the most out of Google+, with a good explanation of its different (and clever) hashtag behaviors. I still believe the unintuitive navigation poses a barrier to widespread adoption, and that community is hard to cultivate without that critical mass.
- Twitter released a gorgeous data visualization of all the verified accounts. It’s colored by category: blue for news, purple for government and politics, red for music, yellow for sports, and green for TV. You can zoom in close to see the verified account names. The yellow patch bottom right shows sports accounts in with music and TV at bottom right — at first glance, it looks like mixed martial arts tweeters are making a big media splash.
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Try it: Visualize search worldwide
Add another curiously mesmerizing big data visualization to your procrastination list. This colorful visualization serves up a (presumably filtered for a G rating) constantly-updating view of all the Google search terms people in the U.S. are entering in near real-time. For fun, toggle over to see search terms in ten other countries, including Australia, India, and Russia.
Feature request: a customized version for brands to visualize the terms most frequently associated with the brands, like “Arsenal + Wenger” or “Harvard + financial aid.” There are other ways to discover those terms, but would be terrific to visualize them out of the box for a presentation on brand associations.
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6 ways to view the new YouTube trends map
Video on the internet has come a long way from the jerky, plugin-encumbered frustration of the late 90s to its speed and near-ubiquity today. YouTube now reports 1 billion unique monthly visitors watching more than 6 billion hours of video each month. The proliferation of smart phones and accompanying rise in social sharing mean that mobile video viewing is at an all-time high.
Data visualization pro Martin Wattenberg has collaborated with the YouTube trends team to create a map of trending videos in the U.S. Six ways to explore the data:
- Click on any of the video thumbnails on the map to play. I’m generally not a fan of the lightbox treatments because they lose the metadata that provides context — but it works well here. Interestingly, the lightbox views seem to have no pre-roll.
- Mouse over the video list by cities/regions at right. The other videos on a map will gray out and let you see at a glance what’s playing where nationally.
- Next, toggle between Shares and Views in the filter bar at top. I love this as a metric to understand what people enjoy watching versus what they suggest others watch.
- Click Male or Female in the filter bar to see what’s trending by gender. On Tuesday, the females seemed to be watching Blake Shelton while the males tuned into Charles Ramsey.
- Click the age ranges to see what’s trending by the usual bands. The high overlap between the 13 year olds and the 65+ crowd confirms my suspicion that the age reporting in YouTube is highly suspect. Twelve year olds tend to sign up as senior citizens to avoid age restrictions, and Google prevents them the changing the age on the account when they go back to fix it in their late teens.
- Finally, scroll down below the map to see the top videos trends bars. The colors cleverly derive from the video thumbnail, and offer a great visual that changes as you select filters up top. It’s a great way to see, for example, that tonight there is uniformity in what people are watching but far more variety in what they are sharing.
The trends map is an immensely readable view of the enormous U.S. video data set. For large publishers of video to YouTube, this would be a terrific at-a-glance addition to a video performance dashboard.
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3 tips for timelines
I can still remember the pain of drawing history report timelines during an analog childhood. The inevitable result was a shaky line of unequal width, with at least one or two skips on the ruler, and uneven pointed arrows each end. A career in draughtsmanship did not beckon.
Timelines seem like the kind of thing digital technology would solve easily. We’d all agree on a protocol and set of user experience conventions, and voilà — a customizable template for slider-enabled, scannable history of any topic. Sadly, that doesn’t seem to have happened. While there are some solid solutions out there, there’s still a wide variety in execution and no common user experience dominates. Here are three tips for designing and developing a timeline.
- Think upfront about the content types/data points and the relationship among them. Will there be video? A slideshow? An infographic? When crafting the layout, let the content drive the design and not the reverse. It’s too easy to fall in love with a polished design experience to realize only too late that it won’t accommodate the information that will tell the story.
- Build in substantial testing with real users to make sure that features are not too subtle to be useful. It’s easy to underestimate actual user frustration with fiddly fingers and a bouncing eye track.
- Mobile views of the timeline are a requirement in a world where the Guardian reports record mobile traffic, and Buzzfeed, going after the bored-people-in-line market is up to 50% mobile. As devices and browsers proliferate, the user experience may need to degrade gracefully for some devices.
Here are two recent timeline examples with divergent approaches and effects. First, the Chronicle of Higher Education offers a timeline of MOOCs (massively open online courses). It’s a clean if clunky view, with a collapse feature that reduces the elements to headlines and a button to reverse the chronology. A vertical view may be easier for older users, but there’s no responsive for mobile. Best of all the timeline accommodates various content formats while keeping the layout clean.
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) launched a beta site last week (coverage here) with a timeline view of the assets. This timeline is elegant, with a sexier horizontal orientation and responsive for mobile (although not fully swipe-able). The biggest challenge posed here is the content — there’s a long historical timeframe but some screens with 0 items shown. The controls are also extremely sensitive, and you have to drag the slider rather than click on an individual year to jump back and forth.
Bottom line: timelines aren’t a universally solved problem or easy to get right — a successful outcome depends on balancing functionality with design and working with the content and timeframe you have.