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Randy Krum
President of InfoNewt.
Data Visualization and Infographic Design

Infographic Design

Infographics Design | Presentations
Consulting | Data Visualizations

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Caffeine Poster

The Caffeine Poster infographic

Entries in internet (195)

Thursday
Jan282010

Circular Browser Statistics using Axiis

Michael VanDaniker posted this Historical Browser Statistics visual as part of the launch of Axiis, including the detail about what it took to develop this visual.  At its root, this is a timeline that starts at the center (January 2002) and works outward to the outer ring that represents the most recent time slice (August 2009).  Each ring is a stacked bar showing the portion of browser usage.

Each of the concentric rings are essentially pie charts showing the percentage of visitors using each browser for a particular time slice, starting with January 2002 in the center and working out to August 2009.  The numbers on W3schools.com don’t quite add up to 100% because they don’t report on browsers that make up less than 0.5% of their visitors.  This results in a gap at the end of each ring.

I don’t know much about Axiis (yet…), but its a new, open source framework for data visualizations.

Thanks to Les (@lesjames on Twitter) for the link!

Tuesday
Jan192010

6 Twitter Topic Visualizations for "Caffeine Poster"

The Caffeine Poster got a huge amount of traffic, specifically on Twitter, so I thought this would be a good chance to share a collection of the available, interactive twitter visualizations.  Although there are many visuals that show a Twitter user’s network of connections, these are visualizations that show conversations based on the search topic “caffeine poster” on Twitter.

SocialCollider.net, by Karsten Schmidt and Sascha Pohflepp, maps the connections within a conversation starting with a Twitter stream or search topic.

This experiment explores these possibilities by starting with messages on the microblogging-platform Twitter. One can search for usernames or topics, which are tracked through time and visualized much like the way a particle collider draws pictures of subatomic matter. Posts that didn’t resonate with anyone just connect to the next item in the stream. The ones that did, however, spin off and horizontally link to users or topics who relate to them, either directly or in terms of their content.

 

The Twitter Streamgraph from Jeff Clark at Neoformix.

The StreamGraph shows the usage over time for the words most highly associated with the search word. One of these series together with a time period are in a selected state and coloured red. The tweets that contain this word in the given time period are shown below the graph. You can click on another word series or time period to see different matches. In the match list you click on any word to create a different graph with tweets containing that word. You can also click on the user or comment icons and any URL to see the appropriate content in another window. If you see a large spike in one time period that hides the detail in all the other periods it will be useful to click in the area to the left of the y-axis in order to change the vertical scale.

 

Cloud.li, by Elbert F, creates a word cloud based on your search terms.

 

 

 

Trendistic will plot the tweet volume on a timeline based on your search terms.  You can click anywhere on the timeline to see the specific tweets for that time too.

Trendistic is a tool that allows you to track trends on Twitter, similarly to what Google Trends does for Google searches. It gathers tweets as they are posted, filters redundant ones and compiles the rest into one-hour intervals.

This way, it shows how the frequency of one, two, three and four-word phrases fluctuate over time. The result is a visualization of what is popular and what is not among Twitter users, and how certain events are reflected or even predicted by themicroblogosphere.

You can enter a phrase (topic) in the 
Trendistic search box to see how its frequency varies over time, or several different topics separated by commas to see how they relate (each topic will show in the chart with a specific color): try comparing ‘dinner’ and ‘breakfast’ or ‘morning’ and ‘night’ for instance, to see how powerful it can be. 

 

 

TwitterFall shows you the tweets based on your search term, and presents them as an animated waterfall.

Twitterfall is a way of viewing the latest ‘tweets’ of upcoming trends and custom searches on the micro-blogging site Twitter. Updates fall from the top of the page in near-realtime.

For popular trends, Twitter is queried from the Twitterfall server, and results arepushed to your browser, rather than your browser doing the queries, or your computerpolling our server repeatedly. This means using Twitterfall for popular trends is nicer on Twitter than other services.

 

 

 TwitRadar.com will map out a search term, a user or a hastag into a handful of different visuals.

Google Translated from Portuguese: The TwitRadar is a tool for monitoring Twitter. With TwitRadar you can track, monitor and share real-time, the subject you want. Just type the tag you want to track, the TwitRadar show, very simple and intuitive, all that is written about it on Twitter. And not to be confused with the volume of information tracked, the TwitRadar organizes the results according to the criteria that you want.

Wednesday
Jan062010

Digital Podge 09 - Fantastic infographic website design

A fantastic, infographic website design for Digital Podge 2009.  Digital Podge is an annual, invitation-only lunch in London, UK for only 160 invitees.  The 2009 event was held on December 19th, and since the invite list was fixed at 160, a number of the infographics deal with data about the attendees.  Each attendee has a bar beneath their photo indicating how many connections they have on LinkedIN.

The About page shows a map of where the attendees traveled from to get to the event.

The Menu page show a breakdown of the lunch entree selections made by the attendees.

The Where? page is interactive, allowing the user to add or remove layers to the map that can show restaurants, bus stops, subway stations, parks, etc.

Designed by London digital agency Line, the site employs simple infographics with a touch of tongue-in-cheek humor.

“While simply being invited to Digital Podge is a huge honour in itself, being tasked with developing and carry out all the campaign touch points for the event is an exercise that holds the agency up to the scrutiny of its peers like no other project. It’s probably one of the most demanding briefs in the sector, but our team of designers and developers revelled in the opportunity to use data in a humorous and informative manner that highlights some of the plusses and minuses of a cutting edge industry,” said Ross Laurie, Managing Director at Line.

Tuesday
Jan052010

Twitter Territory: A Different Twitter Map

Twitter Territory is a different kind of Twitter map made in collaboration between designer Mike Wirth and Shannon Sweetser from HubSpot.com.  Made using HubSpot’s data from Twitter Grader, the map shows how people in all 50 states compare to the national average grade of 66 (which is an D, isn’t it?).

I think this is a great use of HubSpot’s data, and the map is a great way to introduce people to the Twitter Grader for the first time.  As a social media marketing tool, now all Shannon has to do is sit back and hope people blog and Tweet about it.  Oh wait…I just did.

I also noticed that @MikeWirth (91) and @Shannon (98.1) both get A’s!  Great job!

Monday
Jan042010

Visual Mapping Blogroll - Subway Map of Infographic Websites

 

The Visual Mapping Blogroll!  I only recently came across this great use of the Subway Map infographic metaphor.  The map is a listing of website bookmarks grouped into categories for each line.  And the best part is that the overall theme is infographics and design websites, so the categories are things like Visualization, Mind Mapping, Humor, Creativity, Thinkers, etc.

Created by Claude Aschenbrenner (SerialMapper.com), the graphic is modeled onto the Paris subway system.  Because of that (and that Claude speaks French), each line is identified in French on the left end and English on the right end.  Websites that are in French are also noted in blue text.

He has two posts about the subway map and how it was created here and here.  There’s also an alternate version based on the website authors.

Great job Claude!  (and not just because Cool Infographics was included on the map…)  Can we expect to see an updated version anytime soon?

Thanks to the #smchat group on Twitter for the link!

 

EDIT: I forgot to add that each node is an active HTML link, so when viewing the map you are able to click on any site to be taken directly there.

Tuesday
Dec292009

Welcome to the New & Improved "Cool Infographics"

Cool Infographics 2.0

Over the holidays I’m moving the Cool Infographics blog to a new host (Squarespace.com) so I can add some new features.  This time seemed the best since traffic is really low during the holidays.  Please pardon any issues you have in the next couple of days.

Here’s what you can expect from Cool Infographics in 2010:

  • Updates to the overall design
  • Same URL: CoolInfographics.com
  • Same RSS Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/CoolInfographics
  • New infographics bookstore
  • New infographics posters store/links
  • New infographics job postings with a separate RSS feed to alert you to new entries
  • New links page to infographic design software
  • How-to features for creating your own infographics
  • New comment system

You feedback on these changes is very welcome.  So please feel free to use the contact page in the new site design to let me know what you like or don’t like.  And as always, please send me infographics suggestions to include in the blog.

Randy

Friday
Dec112009

Send your own Augmented Reality Christmas Cards!



Merry Christmas from Cool Infographics!

What better way to share your Christmas wishes than with augmented reality?!?  You can send your own AR Christmas cards courtesy of arwishes.com.  You can choose from an assortment of animated images that will appear on screen when you friends and family hold up your Christmas card in front of their computer's webcam.



The cards are printed with the marker, disguised as a holiday image.  In this case, the marker is obviously the Christmas Tree.

A number of companies did this last year, sending out cards with an AR marker printed as part of the card, and a number of them are still online.  You can also print out a card from the sites to see the image yourself.  There will probably be a few more this holiday season as well, but here are some videos from last year's AR cards and links to sites if you want to experience them yourself.

Specialmoves.com:



Special Moves Augmented Reality Xmas Card from Iain Tait on Vimeo.

TellArt:


Tellart 2008 Holiday Card from Tellart on Vimeo.

Stella Artois:

Total Immersion:

There's even a video of sending your own AR Christmas Cookies!

Thursday
Nov192009

Cool Infographics 2.0 BETA


Exciting things are happening around here!  Watch closely in the next couple of weeks for a bunch of changes to Cool Infographics!  I'll also post about the changes as they happen on Twitter.

Step 1: Cool Infographics now has a new URL address:  www.coolinfographics.com

Please change your bookmarks to the new address.  The old URL address, coolinfographics.blogspot.com, will keep working for a few weeks, but eventually will go away.
If you use an RSS reader, nothing changes.  The RSS feed doesn't change so you don't have to do anything.

Step 2: Watch for the design changes in the next few weeks (like the new logo above!).  I've got some big plans for Cool Infographics.

Sounds easy with only two steps doesn't it?  That's because I get to do all of the work.

Thanks to everyone for reading and subscribing!

Thursday
Nov192009

Motionbox PRO discount & Roku Box Giveaway

Motionbox is an online service to share video content that allows you more control over who can view your content.  They are also a video hosting service that allows you to embed video on your own site with a clean, "white label" player without any watermarks, ads or branding from the video site (like YouTube, Vimeo, etc.)

  classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"  codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"  width="416"  height="312"  id="mbox_player_7a9fd8b41c11eec6f5">                width="416"      height="312"      name="progressive_player"      allowscriptaccess="always"      allowfullscreen="true"      data="http://player.motionbox.com/VideoPlayer.swf?"      type="application/x-shockwave-flash"      flashvars="video_uid=7a9fd8b41c11eec6f5&security_token=prod3.e05cc924932ecddb&type=hd"    >        

To watch the video, you'll first need to  install the flash player.

    
'
  

NOVEMBER GIVEAWAY: Anyone who signs up for a free account in the month of November (one week left!) can enter into the giveaway of 3 Roku HD players.  If you're not familiar, the Roku Box connects to your TV and allows you to stream video from the Internet to you TV, including HD content.  Official Rules are here.

All you have to do is sign up for a FREE Motionbox account before November 30, 2009 then email offers@motionbox.com with subject line "Roku Giveaway" and we'll enter your name for a chance to win a Roku HD  Player. 

Also, for any readers interested in signing up for the PRO account, the $50 setup fee will be refunded.  Once you’ve set up your account, send an email to offers@motionbox.com with offer code PROblogger2009 and they will set up your refund.

A special gift for you and your readers: From now until the end of the year, sign up for a Motionbox PRO account, and we’ll refund your $49.99 set up fee! 
Motionbox PRO provides small businesses, pro bloggers, and commercial content producers with a comprehensive video hosting solution. PRO service includes archival storage, web-based editing, streaming and embedding, all in superior quality, up to 1080p HD.

Thanks to Lowell for setting this up for readers of Cool Infographics!

Wednesday
Nov182009

Visual Map of 30 Free Online Promotion Websites



Great visual map of the connections between free online sites to promote your content.  Made by Chris Watson at Visualization Magazine.
This visualisation was made to help inform and advertise on how easily and effectively you can use the web 2.0 tools to build an online presence through free sites, feeds, embed and monitor progress/stats.
Chris also has links to all of these icons in his post in case you want to create your own Web 2.0 visual.