The Web 2.0 Points of Control Map

The Web 2.0 Summit Points of Control Map is a very cool, interactive map.  As part of the marketing for the upcoming Web 2.0 Summit (November 15-17 in San Francisco) they have released this interactive map that takes the metaphor of web companies/brands as countries on a map (from xkcd.com and flowtown.com) to a new level.

Pan and Zoom to explore the map, and click the icons to get some insight about each player and their position.

Then, turn on the comments view to discuss the map with others and add your own ideas!

By clicking on any of the company icons at the top, arrows are shown to indicate the business areas (continents) that the companies are trying to expand into (colonize).  You can turn them on one at a time, or turn many of them on at the same time.

Additionally, you can select any individual icon to get more details:

John Battelle has an in-depth post on the Web 2.0 Summit blog, Points of Control: The Map, about the creation of the map, and his hope that others will add to it in the future.

We’ve put the entire map under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means we want you to take this idea and add to it, making it better. Once our amazing development partners at Blend Interactive catch their breath, we also plan to release the code and documentation, so you can create your own maps as well.

Our thanks to the team at Blend who worked with me to bring this vision to reality, and to Janetti Chon, my producer, who kept it on track, and the entire team at Web 2.0 for bearing with us as we brought this first iteration to fruition.

Found on VizWorld.com and VizThink.com 

Facebook's Secret Strategy Infographic

Art: Audrey Fukuman

There was some controversy when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unintentionally revealed the 2010 Facebook Strategy Infographic that was printed on the inside liner of his hoodie at the D8 conference.  Audrey Fukuman at SFWeekly.com has recreated the infographic based on the video and photos.

Photo via AllThingsD/Anna Mathat

According to SFWeekly.com, this was a hoodie given to all Facebook employees.

I expect some disagreement, but I’m a firm believer that you can absolutely design an infographic to represent a strategy, a concept or a qualitative result.  Infographics don’t have to be based only on a massive amount of quantitative, numeric data.  What do you think, does this qualify as an infographic?

Here’s the video clip from the AllThingsD D8 conference when Mark removed the hoodie and revealed the graphic:

Found on SFWeekly.com and digg.com

Recalled Baby Products infographic

The team at HugaMonkey.com has created this neat timeline of Baby Product Recalls in 2009 and 2010.  The timeline is the main feature, but they also broke down the recalls by injury and product type in the bar charts below.

Thanks Matt for the link!

The FedEx Universe

Revised Infographic

Robin Richards (ripetungi) created this infographic about the FedEx Universe for MeetTheBoss.com.  The version above is slightly modified to correct the size of some of the bubbles, add some mind-map style connection lines and add some photo images.

Created for MeetTheBoss.tv, it is a celebration of Fedex as a company and its size.  Working thought creating this, I was amazed at the huge numbers involved in running a global company and getting packages around the earth.  This is what I have tried to show.

I have updated this infographic.  I received some great feedback from Randy Krum over at Coolinfographics.com (Great Site) and on reflection decided that it could be improved with greater use of the bubble mind map graphics.  So that is what I have done.  Also added some more eye candy with images inside of the main bubble totals. Let me know what any thoughts on the old vs the new.

You can see the original version below, and Robin has posted some comment about creating it on his blog, ripetungi.com.  There’s a lesson here for infographic designers everywhere; the viewer sees the area of objects as representative of scale.  So in the original version, the diameter of the bubbles changed with the value, but in the corrected version, the area of the bubbles changes.  When the diameter increased by 2x, that meant that the area increased by 3.5x and the bubbles didn’t accurately represent the values.

Also worth noting that Robin created this infographic in ONE day.  Great work under tight timelines!

Original Version

Brand Ad Agencies infographic

Shane Keaney and Andrew Nicholas at CityPoolDesign.com created this great infographic called BrandAddies that analyzes and compares the top 13 brand advertising firms.  There’s a high-resolution PDF available from the CityPoolDesign.com site, from The Think Tank page.

For ourselves and others we’ve made a little compendium as an entry point into the world of branding via some basic info about of the best know firms. We chose the following 13 firms: Arnell group, The Brand Union, Chermayeff & Geismar, Futurebrand, Interbrand, Landor, Lippincott, Minale Tattersfield, Sterling Brands, Saffron Consultants, Siegel+Gale, vsa Partners, Wolff Olins, and compared the basic facts of: 

1. When they were started and by whom. 

2. How many people they employ. 

3. How many locations they have. 

For each firm we also included a great sample identity, and a sample identity that we feel is not so great.

Thanks for the link Shane!

Market Visual (BETA) knowledge maps

I came across Market Visual Knowledge Maps this morning.  It claims to still be in BETA, and it maps business relationships based on companies or people that you enter.  It seems to build these mind maps on the fly, and saves any maps that you have build so you can retrieve them later.

It's a service you have to pay for, but if you're looking through annual reports and SEC filings to find people and connections, this will save you a bunch of time.  There's a fully interactive sample map, as well as an introductory video.

The Conversation Prism 2.0 has been released!

Check out the new version of The Conversation Prism 2.0 by JESS3 and Brian Solis and theconversationprism.com.  Available as a poster for $20 US on thier website, and they also have some high-resolution versions available.

I love the design of this one.  It's seems to be essentially a mind map, but much easier to read and understand.

This is an update to the original Conversation Prism that you can see here on Flickr.

Thanks Dana!  I found the link to the 1.0 version on ON:Digital+Marketing

Honda Ad: Keep Doing

Not sure if this Honda Ad is truly "infographics", but it's close.  It sounds like Garrison Keillor from "A Prairie Home Companion" doing the narration.

Thanks Paulo.

GE: Plug into the Smart Grid

Great interactive infographic website from GE for their Plug Into The Smart Grid ad campaign.  Beautiful graphics, fast, clean interface and all-around good job.  The viewer can change the setting, and see the infographic results change in response.

My son loves the Augmented Reality part!  Not really infographic, but fun.

Mapping the Growth of Target

Nathan Yau over on FlowingData.com has done a great job creating an animated map showing the growth of Target stores across the U.S.

Well, fortune was smiling on me last week, and I got a hold of data for Target opening dates and locations (thnx, Cole). So here it is - a map that shows the growth of Target from 1962 through 2008.

Nathan has promised to combine the data from this map with his previous work mapping The Growth of WalMart, into one map where you can see the differences.  So we'll keep our eyes out for that.