The Fall of Tech on digg.com

From readwriteweb.com, an area chart showing the decline of Tech stories made popular on digg.com. Although initially the front page of digg.com was totally dominated by Tech stories and the primary users were tech geeks, the World & Business category is now the reigning king with the most stories made popular.

To put this into context, on 1 January 2006 tech stories made up 78% of the total popular stories (i.e. stories that made it onto the digg frontpage). By end of March 2008, that percentage had dropped to 18-20%.

Here you can see the same information charted as total number of stories made popular instead of percentages.

The Growth of Wal*Mart

Great video found on blog.kiwitobes.com that show the store expansion of Wal*Mart starting with the first store in 1962. Based on the publicly available data on freebase.com.

Star Wars Toy Collection

Josh Budich has created the website My Star Wars Collection to share his personal collection of over 600 Star Wars figures. He has created a pixel image of each figure in his collection. Moving you mouse over the image brings up the name of the character, and clicking brings up a photo of the figure still in its packaging. The are a number of ways to narrow down the assortment by figure series, movie the character appeared in or year the figure was released.

Thanks Torquil for sending this one in.

Dark Matter distorts light

From NASA.gov, an image depicting how Dark Matter (in red) distorts light from distant galaxies as it travels across the universe.

Explanation: Is the distant universe really what it appears to be? Astronomers hope not. Intervening dark matter, which is normally invisible, might show its presence by distorting images originating in the distance universe, much the way an old window distorts images originating on the other side.

The Ebb and Flow of Movies

From nytimes.com. This is a very cool way to visualize the spike in movie ticket revenue when movies are released in theaters, and then slow down quickly after the first week. The graphic covers 1986-2007, and when you look back you can only find a few movies that maintained high ticket sales for more than a couple weeks. Star Wars Episode 1 and Titanic both had high sales for almost 6 weeks. Highlight and click any "wave" to see the details for that movie.

Summer blockbusters and holiday hits make up the bulk of box office revenue each year, while contenders for the top Oscar awards tend to attract smaller audiences that build over time. Here's a look at how movies have fared at the box office, after adjusting for inflation.

Thanks for sending in the link Dániel!

The Calculators of HP poster

From the The Hewlett Packard Calculator Page.

This poster shows every HP calculator made starting with the famous HP-35. Each calculator is displayed with it's production start and end data, and it's project codename.

It's amazing how many of these I have actually used. This is similar to the Evolution of Apple Design...but with more buttons.

Meet The World, Infographic Flags

Meet The World is an infographic project that uses the colors of eight national flags to represent some of the current issues in the world.

Icaro Doria is Brazilian, 25 and has been working for the magazine Grande Reportagem, in Lisbon, Portugal, for the last 3 years. He is part of the team (with Luis Silva Dias, João Roque, Andrea Vallenti and João Roque) that produced the flags campaign which has been circulating the Earth in chain letters via e-mail.

I found the link to this on rc3.org.

5,000 years of Faith

From mapsofwar.com, this is a 90-second flash video showing when the major religions formed and where they spread across the globe. Great combination of a map with a timeline.

Found on digg.com

How many employees does Google have?

16,805 full-time employees worldwide as of December 31, 2007, Google says. Here on blogscoped.com visualized with one icon per person. It's a big image.

Found on Infosthetics.

Who has the Nuclear Weapons?

An infographic video from GOOD Magazine, a quick 3-minute video that shows who has the nukes, how many they have, and how much damage would one nuke hitting the Empire State Building cause.

Found on tunequest.org