Infosthetics Takes a Break...

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On this side of the planet, the summer has just started. Hence infosthetics is finally taking a long break to get away from it all, and will enjoy the western side of its spectacular host country in a +2,500km (+1,500 miles) motorhome road trip. Naturally, postings will be dramatically less for the next weeks, unless you really want to hear about some gorges, beaches, dolphins, whale sharks, and the inevitable sunburn.

FeedVis RSS Feed Tag Cloud Generator

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FeedVis [jasonpriem.com] is an online tag cloud generator with some additional interactive features. Users can select specific time periods, common blog themes or individual blog feeds. Individual tags can be further explored to read specific blog posts of interest.

Tags are ordered by frequency and frequency change. Frequency denotes how many times a word is used per 1000 words.

SpatialKey: Time and Location Based Information Mapping

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The next geographical mapping startup, SpatialKey [spatialkey.com] is marketed as a "next generation Information Visualization, Analysis and Reporting System". It is specifically designed to help organizations quickly assess location-based information to allow for decision making processes and reporting requirements. There are several online demos available, ranging from "Wal-Mart store openings (1962 - 2005)" to "San Antonio prostitution arrests (January, 2006 - July, 2007)"

In practice, users can view and overlay all sorts of "geo-temporal data" (data with recorded location and time information) and generate time slices of the data, much like a moving weather map.

Nationhood : The future of Nationalism

 The future of NationalismOn June 2008, Alan Smith posted a great article on the topic of Nationhood,
on his Personal Cargo, part of the Space Collective community. As he
explains on his post: "As time marches on, we see the weakening of
geographical forces on the lives and activities of humans. The borders we
used to draw are being replaced with centers and relationships of relevance.
People flock to cities, the countryside empties, and the connection to a
National identity in a virtual connected world is no longer the most
powerful connection an indivudal feels to another group. So where will this
trend take us? What will the nations of the future look like?

The Shortest Path Tree

The Shortest Path TreeBrandon Martin-Anderson has produced a series of interesting maps from several US cities depicting the shortest path tree within its transportation networks.The shortest path tree is produced by loading street and transit information into a piece of software that computes shortest routes, called Graphserver, and then exporting the resulting tree to a custom-format text file. That text file is read by a program written in Processing, which calculates the width of each branch by recursively summing the length of every branch upstream from the given branch. The Processing program then spits the output to screen.Seen here are the shortest path trees of San Francisco Bay Area (first image) and Portland. Red lines represent transit, black lines indicate walking.

DoodleBuzz: Typographically Scribbling Online News

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Doodle Buzz [doodlebuzz.com] is an online news aggregator with a visual twist. Users are requested to submit their favorite news theme or topic, and to draw a crazy, chaotic, all-over-the-place, messed-up, scribbled line on the white canvas. The line is then used as the framework to layout the headlines, summaries and related topics. The aim is to create an entirely new way of exploring information, one that allows for a kind of "quiet chaos" that gives people the opportunity to explore unthought of paths and connections along their news gathering journey. The data is fetched from DayPI, a recent service by DayLife that allows a new architecture of online news.

Call the Shots for Radiohead

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Japanese TV station WOWOW has a feature on their site that lets you mix a video of a live Radiohead performance [wowow.co.jp] from the Saitama Super Stadium leg of their 2008 Japanese tour. A set of quite aesthetic data visualizations accompanies this online music video mix tool.

The video interface allows you to choose from 12 colour-coded cameras to record your own "rainbow" (the song 15 Step is the opening track from Radiohead's In Rainbows album).

Sioc.me: 3D Visualization of Semantic Space

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SIOC.ME [sioc.me] is a "real-time interactive visualization of boards.ie semantic data in three-dimensional space". The project was originally submitted for entry to the Boards.ie SIOC Data Competition that, based on over 10 years of online discussion and around 9 million documents, invited submissions to create something which uses the data in an interesting manner.

The visualization allows a user to select a forum from boards.ie and explore it within a 3D space throughout various spatial configurations (i.e. Carousel, Linear, Stacked, Random or Grid).

Three More Animated Infographics Videos

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Three more animated infographic video that have not yet appeared on infosthetics.

Vizzl: Visual Search and Shopping Engine

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Vizzl [vizzl.com] is a new visual search / shopping engine that allows users to perform dynamic filtering, sorting and a number of view modes on all the search results retrieved from Amazon, eBay or YouTube.

As a new Adobe Flex based application, Vizzl features dynamic animations and transitions to deliver a more immersive search experience, in an aim to make searching information "fun and fast". For example, Amazon books can be sorted by relevance, best selling, price, alphabet, or release date, while views can be changed to reveal more or less detailed information.