TED - ideas worth spreading

Visualize this!

For my data visualization I googled the term to find some inspiration. And the stuff I found. There is so many ways of visualize data in so many interesting ways.
These are a few awesome ways of creative solutions:

fidg't
"Fidg’t is a desktop application that aims to let you visualize your network and its predisposition for different types of things like music and photos. Currently, the service has integrated with Flickr and last.fm, so for example, Fidg’t might show you if your network is attracted or repelled by Coldplay, or if it has a predisposition to taking photos of their weekend partying. As the service expands to support other networks (they suggest integrations with Facebook, digg, del.icio.us, and several others are in the works), this one could become very interesting."
(text source)

Digg Stacks
This is a data visualization of diggs on digg.com. It works so that the more people that diggs something on the web, the higher the stacks get. This is a real-time visualization and it is more then easy to spend a few hours here.

TagLines
"Taglines from Yahoo! Research allows you to visualize Flickr tags over time. For each day, dating back to June 4, 2004, the eight most popular tags are shown with a photo selected for each. You can view Taglines in waterfall mode, which displays eight tags and respective photos in eight rows, or in river mode, where tags and their photos “flow” from right to left."
(text source)

These are just a few examples that I found that I really thinks work perfectly. It is such a good idea to visualize something that normally would be really confusing or hard to see or simply just boring. I could really get in to this kind of designing. It is smart and very entertaining.

Make sure to check out:
walk2web
Digg RADAR
Zillow
CrazyEgg
KartOO

Home-made categories

Something that got stuck in my head after the lecture in week 5 was the concept of folksonomy. How we have, in difference to taxonomy, have found a system to this very loose and undefined way of categorising things. I really like the idea of tags and how they are informal and personal. It means that we can take a part in other peoples associations and metaphors which in the end will open us up to new ways of thinking.
So what exactly is folksonomy? Well, it is a social way of giving things a belonging with the help of tags. This is a informal and loose way of putting things in to a category. an example of a folksonomy is how flickr uses tags to structure their collection of photos. The different tags and the combination of tags give the photo a category, although it could be categories like "bullshit" or "crap". This photo from flickr is taged with the words: audio, music, sound, listen, stereo, hifi, mono, speaker, pump, disco, tape, tapeplayer, player, cassette, unraveled, mess, broken, spewing, spitting, pattern, chaos, magnetic, retro, symmetric, mirrored, reflection, tangled, unwound, fastfoward, rewind and eject. Now all of these tags is related to this image, but in all kinds of different ways. they are personal, individual, metaphoric or literal. this means for example if I'm looking for something that will represent mess I can find this photo, and it might represent mess in a different way then I was thinking but it is still a mess.
another example of a good use of tags is tag clouds. This is a collection of tags which have a size factor attached to them as well. For example the tag cloud on We Heart It (click on the image to get a bigger picture).
The encourage everyone to tag their hearted items so that people easily can find what their looking for, or at least a range of suggestions. I think this is a great way of presenting a web site with this kind of information. it is easy, it is inspiring, it is effective and it gives you an idea on what the most popular images have been tagged with.

ffffound nothing

Today I had a look through the photos on We Heart It (yes I am now obsessed with that site) and when I clicked on the source of one of the images it took me to an other similar style of web site. It is called ffffound and has an amazing amount of great images. So I had a look around and it was built on a tag system as well, all up, very similar to We Heart It but a slightly different style. So I thought I'd register. But no. It is built on an invitation only register system. So unless I have some friends that has invitations to give out I can not become a member of this site. This really annoyed me and the fact that not just anyone could become a member, made the whole thing so much more attractive. Then it made me think. In the lecture on Web 2.0 we talked about user based information. How web sites like Amazon.com started a revolutionary concept through their user based rating system, where books that had been forgotten long ago all of a sudden became bestseller again. Now, this way of rating is built on the fact that the more users there is, the more value it gets.
Now, ffffound do not care about that, even though it will be more logically tagged images, and a broader range of tags and images, with a larger members group. They value the mystery around the web site and the human nature to want what we can not have, more then having a large quantity of material.
These are some of the images I've found on ffffound, and if anyone have an invitation to the site, I would love to have one. I'm not desperate or anything. Or. Hm.

I [heart] We Heart It

This is amazing. When studying graphic design it is vital to have a source of good inspiration. And here it is. We Heart It .com is a web site that lets you show other people what you love. this basically means that it is a mega source of inspirational thing that every one is creating and everyone can be a part of. Such an amazing idea. This is how it is explained on the website:

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get visual inspiration from what's best in the web

1 bookmark images and videos from any website with one button

2 see what everyone is 'hearting' and heart it too

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It works with the help of bookmarks. You drag this symbol up on your bookmarks bar and then when you find something out on the Internet that you want to heart, you press the symbol and it allows you to heart it.

So for example, if i found this image I simply click on on my bookmarks bar.

And then it finds the object and makes a frame around it which allows you to add it to your heart (click on the images to make them bigger).


Then it opens a new tab with you chosen picture in you We Heart It account.

So simple and so smart!

So join, and heart. Now.

Rationale

I chose to make a online exhibition about Sweden. The choice of topic was partly because it is something that I know by heart, since I am from there, and partly because I don’t there is any good sites about Sweden out there. When you find a website about a country you’ll find that it feeds you with stereotypes. This is somewhat necessary in order to describe traditions, the people and general facts about the country. This is however often not how people really live or how they really behave. My heart especially lies in the page about Stockholm. If you go to Stockholm as a tourist you won’t fond the good places. You just won’t, unless you really make an effort. I felt like this was a great opportunity to make a proper website about Sweden that would show another side of the country and the people.
When I started this project I looked around on different ways of publish this website. I tried to work with Dreamweaver, iWeb and blogspot. None of those ways of producing website suited my purposes so I had a look at Wordpress. This suited my project because of the easy way of creating new pages. On the other hand you have very limited ways of controlling the layout but since this project didn’t involve designing in that sense it didn’t bother me too much. You could however go in and change the html of the pages. Since I have never worked with html before this unit, it was a great challenge to understand and manage a small website and see how it is built up. I started of with building up my different categories. This included a lot of research and required me to narrow down the content on my web page. First I hade eight or nine different categories and then I narrowed it down to five (excluding references), which is much more manageable. I then created some under categories to create a bit more dimension to the page. I then started to create the network of information I needed to make my web page stand out towards other websites about Sweden. This was not only about writing the content on the different pages but also collect links and images that were suitable for the content.
The Different tools I’m using on the website is mostly RSS feeds from different sites. This much due to the porous of my website, which is to show Sweden from a different perspective, and for this flickr worked perfectly. With the help of yahoopipes I created a RSS feed from flickr showing images including the word “Sverige” (Sweden in Swedish). This gave me a perfect variety of images form summer, winter, south and north. Most of them are well-composed images that show a great side of Sweden. I also used the link widget to display other people’s work and show a broader collection of Swedish websites. When I chose these links I made sure that there were both official and unofficial material. One that I am particularly happy with is the “How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons”. This blog’s compliment my blog in a great way since it is written by a American middle aged man that is living in Sweden and is battling with all these Swedish social rules, where as I know the rules and have an other perspective on my blog. I have over all worked a lot with links since Wordpress is slightly restricted on adding widgets. There is a function where you’re supposed to be able to put in any html code as a text widget but I never got it to work and I suspect that it is not available for the web based blogs.
I have not during these project come a cross a website that is similar to mine, and I believe that is because not a lot of Swedish people decides to do a website about Sweden. I also think that the youthful perspective that I bring in to this website is unique. I think that the layout suits my content. It’s clean and easy, black and white features and a very square design. This match up with the Swedish minimalistic deign culture and also in many ways reflects the Swedish people, who are quite squared and reserved.
Most of the images have a Creative Commons license and there for only need an acknowledgment of the owner. On mu music page I have used images from last.fm, and they are all listed on my reference page.
This project really got me to realize how important these collectors of information’s are. The internet is a unlimited resource of information that is there for everyone to use, but in order to find what we’re looking for we need pages that organizes, collects and structures the material so it is easy to accesses and decrease the amount of time we have to spend to find the information we desire.

The wonder of bloging

Now, I am very aware of the fact that I have done two pathetic posts on this blog so far. Not very impressive at all. But I haven't had anything good to write about, and also other uni assignments has been taking over my time.

But finally I have pulled my self together and here is my third blog post.

I just came to think about the amount of history our generation will be leaving behind. When kids are doing history in 100 years, they will have so much information on our lifestyles and habits that it will be overwhelming. And the beauty of it all is that it will not just be information about famous kings, queens or military people. It will be a unending source of information, written by us, normal people about our normal lives. We can, with our blogs, Facebooks, Flickrs, You tubes, and twitters leave our own history behind. and even if it is not the most revolutionary information or stories about how we conquered our neighbour countries it is still fascinating. I really wonder what this will mean for the future, and how big Internet can become. Is it eternal? Will it never end. How will it be structured, if that is the case? Or will Internet be as out of date as letters is starting to be to us? It is so interesting, I wish I could be there to find out.

(Image designed by Sebastian Prooth)