Changing Tides

• Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds
  Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.
  (tags: visualization typography)

I had a play with it using the text from the Wikipedia page about Visualization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visualization_(graphic)):

Click on the image to go to the Wordle website for the full sized version.

It was fun to play with the presentation options, and the results are decorative, but I’m not sure how useful they are in conveying information.

Today the SmashingMagazine announced that it has won the ‘Most Valuable Design Website’ category at Webinale 2008.  The magazines chief editor, Vitaly Freidman, gave a talk and has made the slides available on the SmashingMagazine freebies page (at the bottom):

On May 26-28 Vitaly Friedman, the chief-editor of Smashing Magazine, was in Karlsruhe attending the event. He has also given a talk “Designtrends 2008: What’s Next?”. You can download the slides of the talk below. 

Designtrends 2008: What’s Next? covers current trends in web-development and examples of modern web-design (.pdf, 10 Mb)

They give an interesting snapshot of current trends in web design.

• NodeBox | Home
  NodeBox is a Mac OS X application that lets you create 2D visuals (static, animated or interactive) using Python programming code and export them as a PDF or a QuickTime movie. NodeBox is free and well-documented.
  (tags: visualization python)
• Avogadro - Molecular Editor
  Avogadro is an advanced molecular editor designed for cross-platform use in computational chemistry, molecular modeling, bioinformatics, materials science, and related areas. It offers flexible rendering and a powerful plugin architecture.
  (tags: chemistry visualization python)

• SAGE: Open Source Mathematics Software
  SAGE: Open Source Mathematics Software.
  Creating a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab

• Lily | Visual Programming for the Mozilla Framework
  Lily is a browser-based, visual programming environment that lets people create programs graphically, without writing code, by drawing connections between data, images, sounds, text and graphics. (interface looks a bit like Max/MSP)
  (tags: programming)

I finally decided to buy Pukka. I kept trying it out, and not quite deciding to buy it. But two things happened today that made up my mind.

One was I discovered that as well as being fantastic for posting to del.icio.us, it also gives me access to all my del.icio.us bookmarks, organised by tag!  By adding this to the Mac status bar at the top of the screen it gives me quick access to my del.icio.us bookmarks.

The other was reading the post in Justin Miller’s blog (the creator of Pukka) about “The Price of Free” which discusses the reluctance of people to pay for utility programs.  Pukka was discussed favourably on a podcast, but the announcer was saying it should be free, not shareware.

I realised that $14.95USD (which was $16.27AUD) was a reasonable price for the time Pukka will save me and it will encourage me to make better use of del.icio.us.  And hopefully paying for it will encourage Justin and others like him to keep providing great applications.

• paperium
  Another digital pen using special paper. Bluetooth to send drawing as vector art or writing back to computer. Mac software.
  (tags: digital_pen)
• Livescribe :: Never Miss A Word
  Digital Pen using special paper. Records sound in synch with writing. Window only but Mac planned.
  (tags: digital_pen)

Another video from the see conference #3

Frank Van Ham is from the IBM Research - IBM’s Many Eyes project. Focussed on the collaborative aspects of information visualisation - the communication of ideas by sharing visualisations.

He describes the history of the project saying that the idea for it came from a variety of things they were noticing as researchers, but in particular three projects.

1. The first project was done by a colleague - a Visual representation of peoples email done in 2003. She stressed privacy to people - but found that people actually sent screenshots to other people - didn’t want to keep it private they wanted to share it.
2. The second project was the Baby Name Voyager. A graph of the popularity of baby names over the last 100 years. In 2005. People started challenging each other to find patterns in this data, as a game.
3. In 2004 there was a visualisation of the USA election with red states and blue states. Different visualisations were shared through blogs.

From these examples they developed their research agenda of “Massive Public Visualization”. Scaling the audience instead of the volume of data.

Important part was to make it easy for people to comment on the data and make their own visualisations. People get excited when they can see their own data.

The site is available www.manyeyes.com

They provide a wide range of visualisation types. Types of uses that they have seen of the site:

• Scientists have been using it for analysis.
• Other people have been using it for personal expression.
• Journalism and Advocacy
• Social Interaction

ManyEyes lets people take their visualisations and embed them into their own websites or blogs. The site is free, but all data is visible to everyone.