NFL TV Distribution Maps

 

 

I found mention of these NFL Maps on Daring Fireball.  Each week, you can see which parts of the country will be broadcasting which games.  Sadly you can't see "why" the networks chose the regions they did.

Map of Local Gas Prices

GasBuddy.com has a cool interactive temperature map of gas prices across the U.S. and Canada that allows you to zoom in to the street level to see prices at specific gas stations.  Prices are all removed from the database when they become over 72 hours old to keep the map current.

Thanks for sending in the link Karen!

Pac-Man Explained

I thought this was great. This one image tells the whole story of the Pac-Man video game. No further explanation needed.

Found on digg.com

Where Does the Money Go?

From the nytimes.com, this graphic visually represents how average consumer spending breaks down, and the color code shows how much spending in that category has changed in the last year. For example, Gasoline is 5.2% of an average consumer's spending, and it has risen 26% from 2007 to 2008.

As far as I can tell, this is actually a treemap, but in a new shape. More details pop-up when you mouse over each of the individual shapes.

Thanks to Tony, for sending in the link.

Know your State Flag Infographics

From calorielab.com, is a humorous take-off of the flag infographics from Icaro Doria (Meet the World, Infographic Flags). These infographics based on U.S. state flags, although probably politically incorrect, are very funny.

Thanks to Mark from calorielab.com for sending in the link.

Treemaps for drive space

I don't think I've posted much about specific software programs, but there are a number of infographic programs that anyone can use. These two are programs that analyze what's on your hard drive, and show it you in a treemap display.

The one above is Disk Inventory X for the Mac (which I use), and the one below is WinDirStat for Windows. Both are free, and are real-life examples of how you can use infographics in your life. So take a minute, and clean off some of that old junk taking up space on your hard drive.

17 Ways to Visualize Twitter

Also from FlowingData.com, this post about the many ways to visualize the Twitter universe is really cool. Twitter has really been gaining some momentum lately, but I keep looking for better ways to follow the posts.

Name that Color

From blog.doloreslabs.com, they showed 1,300 different colors to people on Mechanical Turk, and asked them to name the color.

The above picture contains about 1,300 colors and the names for them that Turkers gave. Each is printed in its color and positioned on a color wheel. Just looking around, there sure seem to be different regions for different names. But there are also rich sets of modifiers (”light”, “dark”, “sea”), multiword names (”army green”), and fun obscure ones (”cerulean”).

They also created a Color Label Explorer tool to only show those color names that match your search term, but still keep them in place on the color wheel graphic.