HTML5: Past, Present, Future

The future is now! HTML5: Past, Present, Future infographic from Dot Com Infoway takes a trip trough time to explain how evolutionary HTML5 is.

HTML5 is the next evolutionary step for the Web world. With HTML5, the possibilities for Web usage are endless. At DCI, we are proud to be ahead of the game in offering HTML5 development for our many clients.

The published HTML5 infographic elucidates the history of HTML through an appealing timeline from its inception in 1990 to HTML5 in 2009. It also lists out the key features, uses and the role of HTML5 in Web applications in a captivating manner. The infographic also illustrates the compatibility of Web applications with various web browsers. It is interesting to note that Chrome and Safari maintain a higher compatibility rating than that of Opera and Internet Explorer.

Mobile applications are what we excel at. We understand how to create the most advanced apps through our development and work with our clients. Research indicates that by 2016, HTML5 usage with mobile browsers will surge to 2.1 billion. And by this year alone, the use of HTML5 in mobile application development has increased to 78%.

It is evident from the research data that HTML5′s trajectory will continue to grow to unbelievable heights in the near future.

This is a beautiful, clear infographic design.  The color palette is kept simple, and the use of icons is fantastic.

From a data visualization perspective, there are a couple of things that would make the design even better:

• It might be just my own taste, but I think the timeline should be laid out to match the correct spacing of the years.  Visually it looks like some something happened every year on the timeline, when in reality each step jumps a different number of years.
• Most of the data sources are cited in among the the visualizations, but no source is cited for the Browser Compatibility numbers.  Where do these values come from?  Are they believable?
• Also in the Browser Compatibility, the shaded portion visualizations are wrong, and don’t match the values they are supposed to represent.  First, because the icons are circles, you have to shaded the AREA of each shape to be true to the data.  If you shade the height of a circle based on the data, the visual doesn’t match the values.  Second, even shading them by height was done incorrectly.  For example, Opera compatibility on Mobile is listed as 60%, but the visualization shows some number under 50%.

Found on Infographics Archive

Best Times to Tweet or Post on Facebook

You put a lot of thought, energy and sometime money into your long-format post or infographic, and you want to get the most traffic out of it you can, right?  Not only is it good SEO practice, but it feels good when someone “likes” your post on Facebook. So why not give yourself the best chance at receiving them? The Best Times to Tweet or Post on Facebook infographic from Raka has the inside scoop!

There are few resources better than URL shortener bitly for monitoring click-through rates for content shared on Facebook and Twitter. So when bitly released a report last month telling us all the best time to tweet or post to Facebook for click-throughs, we listened. And then we created an infographic.

This handy infographic highlights bitly’s data on the best times to share content on Twitter or Facebook if you’re looking to drive traffic to your site (or any site). Bitly found the best times to tweet for click-throughs are early afternoon Monday – Thursday, while Facebook content posted Wednesday at 3 p.m. generates the highest click-through rates, according to bitly’s data.

But why read words when you can look at pictures? Here’s the best-time-to-tweet-or-post-to-Facebook infographic created by digital agency Raka with data provided by bitly:

I really love designs like this.  The data visualization is big and center, and doesn’t need a lot of text to explain the key findings.  I would have reversed the color gradient so the the low times are mostly white and the highest times are dark red, but that’s just me.

At the bottom should be some type of copyright or Creative Commons statement, and the URL to the original infographic should also be included in the infographic design itself.

Hmmm…  Maybe I should have timed this post better…

Thanks to Brian for sending in the link!

The Massive Challenge of Search Engine Complexity

Courtesy Stone Temple Consulting

The complexity of generating Search results online is HUGE.  The What’s So Hard About Search? infographic from SEO expert Eric Enge at Stone Temple Consulting takes a look at the massive numbers involved with indexing and searching the Web.

Building a search engine is a very complex task. I often find myself trying to justify to people why it is that search engines can’t understand their site. They seem fixated on believing that a search engine should understand it if a human can understand it. The short answer is that with an infinite amount of time the search engine could, but the scale of the Internet makes it oh so VERY hard.

The infographic below tries to give you some sense of the scale of the problem. Please note that a few numbers are hard to truly pin down, but I pulled them from the best sources I could. For example, no one really knows how many pages there are on the web, though Majestic SEO is aware of 3.7 trillion (the number I used) or the average web page size.

Regardless, the message is the same either way. The web is a really complex place!

Designed by InfoNewt, the design gathers data from a number of different sources to put together the picture of complexity.  Combining the number of web pages, the average number of links on each web page, the amount of data online and the number of searches every minute, you begin to understand the scale of the challenge search engines face.

This design takes a different approach by citing each data source along with it’s visualization instead of gathering them all at the bottom.  I think it works well with this many different data sources, and is easier for the readers to understand where each part of the data comes from.  All of the key elements are included at the bottom: copyright, brand logo and the URL to the infographic landing page so readers can always find the original (even when blogs repost it without linking or using the embed code).

I just have to say “Cheers!” to the developer teams that tackle this problem every day.  The scope of this challenge will only get bigger in the future!

Thanks to Eric and the team at Stone Temple for being great to work with!

12 Things To Do After You've Written A New Blog Post

The 12 Things To Do After You’ve Written A New Blog Post infographic from DivvyHQ is a self help guide that everyone who likes to post blogs could use. Also, it’s in a comically large printable design that I recommend! Instructions are below.

In early 2011, I was asked to guest blog for the Content Marketing Institute, which actually came from a consistent blog commenting strategy that I have executed for years. With their heavy focus on “how-to” content, I whipped up a post on the “12 Things You Need to Do After Writing a New Blog Post”. The checklist-style post was well received with thousands of retweets, likes and shares.

Now fast forward to March 2012. The infographic craze is in full swing, so I was perusing my content archives looking for something that I could turn into a good visual. I quickly recalled many CMI comments talking about how they had printed out the text-based checklist and had it pinned to their cube wall. BINGO! The rest is history…in the making.

Printing Instructions

1. Click the infographic above to open the PDF version.
2. Save it to your computer/hard drive.
3. Open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat or any PDF Reader application.
4. Hit Print.
5. In the PDF print setting dialog box, look for “Tile Scale” or “Print Scale” and set the percentage to 54%. Your print preview should now be showing that the infographic will print on three 8.5 x 11 sheets. If not, adjust the scale percentage until it fits.
6. Hit Print.
7. Tape the pages together.
8. Check your to-dos.
9. Hang it on your wall.
10. If you need help managing your blog or social media activities, you may want to try our 30-day free trial.

There’s no data shown in this design, it’s more of a process flow infographic.  Although it would have been nice in the infographic version of Brody’s process to show some of the stats behind why each of these activities is valuable to online marketing.

As a process infographic design, the content is very cool and the design matches.  It’s easy-to-read, icon illustrations support the content, minimal text descriptions and I love the added instructions to print it out across three pages to become a reference guide in the real world.

Ruby on Rails Popularity Index 2012

Ruby on Rails isn’t about the gem, but to some people it is just as valuable. It allows people to enter the basic programming world as painless as possible. The Ruby on Rails Popularity Index 2012 infographic created by exist.com (found on infographicjournal.com) illustrating its popularity!

Ruby on Rails has taken the web development world by storm since its first full release in 2005. Yet with new web platforms arriving each day, usage share of frameworks has become quite fragmented. So in this post, I compiled the latest trends and figures of Ruby on Rails from different sources, as well as some stats of the Ruby language.

Here’s an infographic we’ve created that visualizes how far Ruby on Rails has gotten since its release in 2005.

This design from Exist.com comes from Philippines, so there are a couple English grammars errors like “oftenly”, which isn’t a real word.  The design does a good job gathering a number of stats from different sources together to show the general trend of growing usage of Ruby on Rails over the last 5 years or so.

Digital Anatomy of the Affluent Male

Busy busy busy! The affluent male is always searching online! The Digital Anatomy of the Affluent Male from iprospect.com describes who the affluent male is and what he searches for.

There are 19 million affluent males on the Interent and they are shopping online and spending more than ever before.  Forty percent of them are shopping online 2x a week or more and spending over $30k annually.

I really like the design style and the colors on this one.  The correctly-highlighted map in his pocket and the cowboy boot are a nice touch.

The data visualizations do a good job, but there are a bunch of statistics that aren’t visualized and are left just in text.  Visually, this makes these other statistics less important because they didn’t warrant being visualized.  The favorite brands could use the actual logos, and the “What he’s searching for” could use some icons.

From an SEO perspective, the URL at the bottom really should be the landing page address, and once you get to the landing page, there aren’t any social sharing buttons so you are left to your own to figure out how to share it.

Also available as a PDF download.

Thanks to Douglas for sending in the link!

How Has Internet Changed Education?

How has internet changed education infographic from SEO.com explores what kind of impact the Internet has on education. Ever had a question and found yourself on wikipedia? Apparently your not the only one!

If you want evidence of the way the internet is pervading every aspect of our lives, you need look no further than its effect on education. The internet and social media have dramatically changed both teaching and learning.

In fact, most students’ (an incredible 93 percent) first instinct when confronted with a research problem is to turn to Google or Bing to get information rather than going to the library, and despite the best efforts of faculty to discourage its use, Wikipedia is the research resource that is used most often. It’s not only students that are turning to the web, however. A whopping 90 percent of faculty uses social media in the courses they’re teaching, and 8 in 10 have used online video in class. In addition, colleges and universities are reaching out to students in a way they never could before—85 percent of admissions offices use some sort of social media, from video blogging to social networking.

Great clean design.  Easy to read and the visualizations are easy to understand.  The only visual I had an issue with was the grid of icon people.  It’s hard for readers to grasp quantity when the rows aren’t 10 people across, but 33 people across is a very odd number.  33x17=561, 561x10,000=5,610,000, which is less than the “Over 6 million” number on the text.

I’m not sure why the 8 out of 10 faculty data point is shown as 6 out of 8 people in the visualization???

The sources are all listed on the original landing page, but because they are in the infographic design, they are lost whenever someone shares the infographic on another site (like this one), and that hurts the credibility of the design.  That’s one more reason the original landing page URL should be included in the design as well.

Found on WiredAcademic

The Rise of the Slacktivist

Ever had this feeling that you were a Slacktivist? Well wonder no more! The Rise of the Slacktivist infographic from sortable.com will put a rest to all your questions!

Is there any value in a Slacktivist? Can 500,000 people on twitter actually change something? Is hitting the streets and protesting the only real way to cause social change? Sortable takes a look at the rise of slacktivism, and the power this movement has.

This design does a good job of telling a story to the reader that is easy to understand in a linear fashion top-to-bottom.  It starts with the background of “What is a Slacktivist,” then shares a number of behavioral stats about Slacktivists, a few successful Slacktavist campaigns and finally the “10 Signs you might be a Slacktivist” is a self-check for the readers.

The illustrations are mostly relevant, and the overall design isn’t too crowded with information.  I don’t understand some of uses of the social media icons, like why is Twitter representative of volunteering and Facebook representative of taking part in events?  They missed the opportunity to visualize some of their data point too, like the Red Cross stats related to the Haiti earthquake.  Even at least an illustration of five days on a calendar would help.

Even though there are a lot of Sources, they were thorough and correctly included them in the infographic design.  They are also listed on the landing page, but none of that text gets carried along when someone reposts the infographic.

The bottom of the design is missing a copyright statement, and it would be nice to give the designer credit.  Readers are generally more receptive to a design when the designer is mentioned because it comes from somebody and not just a corporation.

Thanks to Brenden for sending in the link!

The United States of Craigslist

Welcome to The United States of Craiglist! This infographic map, found on the IDV User Experience blog, shows approximately how craigslist divides its geographic zones across the U.S.! Very important for a website who bases its usefulness on location!

WHY?  Locality is inherent to the value of craigslist; I go to craigslist.org but I get kicked over to the local instance of craigslist (my IP address sources me to somewhere in the illustrious Lansing, MI).  But how does craigslist know where to send me?   Some mysterious system of assigning a geocoded IP address to just the right site must be in place…I wonder what that map looks like.

When Ian Clemens proposed the idea, I looked around to find an existing map of craigslist sites-to-areas -maybe even find the lookup that they themselves use. I couldn’t find anything like it.
Whether it matches their system well or not, here is a map that approximates geographic coverage to individual sites using a Voronoi process as a base (more info on process below).  It is at least a start at visualizing the geographic coverage and distribution of the community-driven instances of craigslist.  Shapes like this might provide some useful context for other data, demographic or market information, for instance.  Also, when pulled into VFX, it can serve as an input to some spatial querying on those other metrics.

It’s worth noting that this is not from Craigslist at all, but an outside analysis of the cities from the craigslist site and approximates the geographic areas covered by each.  A complete post about how this map was generated is available here, and they have even made all of the data files available in a number of different formats.  Bonus!

Craigslist doesn’t care about state lines, counties, time zones or voting districts.  They care about defining an area that covers certain population levels that effectively use their service.

Thanks to Jim for sending in the link!

Website Hosting Decisions

The Hosting Decisions, From the Chalkboard infographic from Rackspace UK Hosting helps customers to choose how to host their site with this visually decision map.

OK so you already know that we’ve been helping customers define their hosting needs for some years now.

But as customers adopt more service based computing resources like cloud hosting, it’s only logical that they will also now ask more of their hosting provider to ensure they are getting the correct solution.

So we thought hey, let’s produce an infographic to take customers through a simple decision making process on a route to the solution that’s right for them.

This one is a clear, focused topic.  Easy to read, and not a lot of illustrations or images to get in the way.  This decision for companies is actually a little more complicated, but the infographic does pose the right questions.

Thanks to Sav for sending in the link!