“New York Talk Exchange illustrates the global exchange of information in real time by visualizing volumes of long distance telephone and IP (Internet Protocol) data flowing between New York and cities around the world. In an information age, telecommunications such as the Internet and the telephone bind people across space by eviscerating the constraints of distance. To reveal the relationships that New Yorkers have with the rest of the world, New York Talk Exchange asks: How does the city of New York connect to other cities? With which cities does New York have the strongest ties and how do these relationships shift with time? How does the rest of the world reach into the neighborhoods of New York?”

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“Mapjack.com showcases a new level of mapping technology. What others have done with NASA budgets and Star Wars-like equipment, we’ve done on a shoestring budget, along with a few trips to Radio Shack. Specifically, we developed an array of proprietary electronics, hardware and software tools that enable us to capture an entire city’s streets with relative ease and excellent image quality. We have a complete low-cost scalable system encompassing the entire work-flow process needed for Immersive Street-Side Imagery, from picture gathering to post-processing to assembling on a Website.”

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“Reality Mining defines the collection of machine-sensed environmental data pertaining to human social behavior. This new paradigm of data mining makes possible the modeling of conversation context, proximity sensing, and temporospatial location throughout large communities of individuals. Mobile phones (and similarly innocuous devices) are used for data collection, opening social network analysis to new methods of empirical stochastic modeling.”

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“Macrosense is the world’s first platform capable of collecting and analyzing massive amounts of anonymous, aggregate location data in real-time. At the heart of Macrosense are powerful machine learning algorithms that process time-stamped location data and metadata streams from heterogeneous sources – GPS, WiFi positioning, cell tower triangulation, RFID and other sensors – and empower companies and investors to better understand and predict human behavior on a macro scale.”

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Have you ever wanted to browse the bookstore shelves online? Zoomii is a visualization where you can do just that. To quote the founder, “Why Zoomii? Because I love bookstores. Spending afternoons wandering the shelves. Happening across great books I didn’t even know existed. But it’s an experience I never found online. Online bookstores are wonderful. They’ve got amazing prices, huge selections, and they’re open all the time. If you know exactly what you want, they’re perfect. But somehow I kept coming back to the bookstore just to browse. Zoomii is my attempt to bring online as much of the real bookstore experience as possible.” The application was created by Chris Thiessen. NIce job!

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While this isn’t a new project it is one worth looking at. “The sheep market is a collection of 10,000 sheep created by workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Each worker was paid $.02 (US) to draw a sheep facing left.” You can also purchase the sheep through the site or email them to a friend. I’m not sure if any were actually sold but the idea of art and commerce is always a nice idea. The project was created by Aeron Koblin in 2006 with flash.

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The BBC has created a unique way to visualize comments on central question. In this case the question was, (Are white working class people ingored in Britain?). As they state, “spectrum is a different way of presenting a BBC News Have Your Say debate. It allows you to investigate the dabate around BBC 2’s White Season by associating different comments by emotion, location and similarity”. They state in the FAQ that the data is not an opinion poll and is not statistically valid, however, it is a visual way to get an impression of the debate. I enjoyed playing with the filters and clicking on the comments. The key was easy to understand and always there when you need it. The only thing I wish the visualization had was a way to tell which comments I had already clicked on while using any filter. Overall, very well done and engaging.

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“Click on or select from the dropdown a station to see the London Underground map reorganise around the times of travel from that station. Shortest paths are used to place the other stations – radius is proportional to time to travel, and angle should be correct for as-the-crow-flies direction on a map. The concentric circles are at 10 minute intervals. Press ‘g’ to get back to the geographical tube map.” This project was created by Tom Carden with the Processing Visualization Language.

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This is a visualization created by Michael Ogawa and shows the development of software over time. I’ve often wondered how much work went in to creating something like Apache. This visualizations shows you all of the code changes that go into large scale software. Michael used the processing visualization language to create this project. This is how it works, “This visualization, called code_swarm, shows the history of commits in a software project. A commit happens when a developer makes changes to the code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository. Both developers and files are represented as moving elements. When a developer commits a file, it lights up and flies towards that developer. Files are colored according to their purpose, such as whether they are source code or a document. If files or developers have not been active for a while, they will fade away. A histogram at the bottom keeps a reminder of what has come before.”

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When I first opened Moodstream I was excited. There marketing statement said, “Moodstream is a powerful brainstorming tool designed to help take you in inspiring, unexpected directions.” As a designer, I’m always looking for tools to help me find the media I need for current projects. While the interaction looked fine at first, as I started using the application there were functions I felt I needed that were missing. You are presented with images, media and audio, however, there is no way to show just one media type. If I only want to be inspired by images I have to sit though all of the video snips to get to the next image. Next, the control box took up a great deal of above-the-fold space. While you can pause the presentation there is no way to stop and go back one or two images. You just have to wait for all of them to cycle through. On pause, a backbutton would have been very helpful. The core feature of finding media related to mood is a great idea, and Moodstream is a good start, however, it would nice to see some improvements to the UI.

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Visual searches just keep getting better and better. Viewzi is a meta search engine that lets you view relational data in a fun and easy to use visual paradigm. Currently, there are fourteen ways to view a search term including, mp3, video, 3d photo, basic photo, web screenshots and the list goes on. You can scale the results with an interactive slider and they also provide related results in the sidebar. Overall, I find Viewzi a compelling and engaging way to search. Well done!

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This is a nice informational visualization of how different groups voted in the 2008 democratic presidential primaries. I found the visualization quite compelling. It was a great way to see the state by state demographics. The piece was produced by the New York Time website, and used Edison / Mitofsky exit poll for the data. This is a flash based visualization and was created by Shan Carter and Amanda Cox.

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Thinkbase is a new way to navigate and explore information on the web. It is what we call a Visual Wiki. It is based on Freebase, an open, shared database of the world’s knowledge – in other words a Semantic Wiki. Thinkbase uses a visualization tool (Thinkmap) to create an interactive visual representation of the semantic relationships in Freebase. Thinkbase was developed by Christian Hirsch at the University of Auckland.

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I’ve always had trouble understanding the relationship of the elements in the periodic table. This application gives you an understanding of the how those relationships are made. This learning visualization was developed by Adams Brian of Touchspin Design, and is an aid to his own understanding and that of his students. While this is not a new visualization I always like to highlight learning based design. This is a great example. Thanks to Adams and Touchspin.

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Between my work and my blog I look at a lot of interface design. I’m always looking for new ideas that I haven’t seen before but, as you know many times that’s very hard to find. Today I discovered Goosh and I knew I had found something different. Goosh is a website that puts the Google and Wikipedia searchs into a shell paradigm. This give you the feel of navigating these service in a command line environment. You can search all of the standard Google search such as, web, maps, news, feeds, video, and blogs etc. Playing around with this was pure fun. BTW Goosh was written Stefan Grothkopp, and is not an official Google product.

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At first glance I thought Plurk was just a twitter clone, however, after spending some time at the site it seems very different than twitter. Plurk is a microblogging application that hit the Bay Area and my Twitter friends feed in a big way today. The application takes the idea of Twitter and microblogging and adds several new features. Your thoughts appear on a timeline along with your friends thoughts. Instead of just “what are you doing” Plurk lets you add verbs like maxkiesler, loves, likes, shares, gives, and many others. The other interesting aspect of Plurk is the gaming aspect. One of the keys to your experience is your “karma points”. These allow you more privileges on the site, such as, expanded profile, instant messaging, and uploading. There are still performance, and feature issues, however, it seems like a good start.

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JIT is an advanced JavaScript infovis toolkit that was based on 5 papers regarding different information visualization techniques. The JIT implements advanced features of information visualization like Treemaps (with the slice and dice and squarified methods), an adapted visualization of trees based on the Spacetree, a focus+context technique to lay Hyperbolic Trees, and a radial layout of trees with advanced animations (RGraph).

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I’ve seen many shared timeline applications lately, however, Dipity has several features that make it stand out from the rest. Most timeline applications only allow one view if the content in a timeline view. Dipity shows timeline view, list view, flipbook view and a map view. I like the way you can see several view of the same or related information. You can also embed any timeline in your own website. Other features include favorites, comments, feeds and fans for each timeline. Currently this is my favorite shared timeline application.

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