Google PageRank Explained

Another good infographic from Elliance.com.

Google assigns a numeric weighting from 0-10 for each webpage on the Internet; this PageRank denotes your site’s importance in the eyes of Google.

Who Owns the Car Companies? (UPDATE)

TooManyCars.com has updated their family tree style poster of how all of the car companies are related. The latest updates were as of 4/1/08. They have also changed to better software used to zoom into the poster. Each of rectangles you see on the images will zoom in close so you can read the details about the connections.

They've really done a good job tracking down the specific types of relationships and the ownership portions between the companies. High-res PNG or PDF files are also available.

Kapitaal

What if the only things you could see in the world around you were brands and advertising? No walls, no people, no sidewalks...just ads. Apparently it would be more than enough to get around in the world.

This is an awesome video! Thanks to pascal for submitting the link in the comments to an earlier video post: See The World in Words

Visualizing Carbon Dioxide Emissions

This is a great way to visualize gas emissions which are normally invisible. That's why most people don't have any real sense how much is produced by the things you do in everyday life like running your washing machine or refrigerator.

The black balloons really work, with the black color implying "bad" and they're actually filled with a lighter than air gas that rises into the atmosphere. I'm assuming that the size of the balloons actually represents the 50 grams of greenhouse gas discussed in the ad.

Found on infosthetics.com and radar.oreilly.com and the original is at www.saveenergy.vic.gov.au from the Australian government.

Know your State Flag Infographics

From calorielab.com, is a humorous take-off of the flag infographics from Icaro Doria (Meet the World, Infographic Flags). These infographics based on U.S. state flags, although probably politically incorrect, are very funny.

Thanks to Mark from calorielab.com for sending in the link.

One Day Poem Pavilion

Sort of crossing the line between infographics and art. A very cool project called the One Day Poem, from Experimental Typography. The geodesic structure is aligned to the sun, and perforated in a very specific pattern to show different parts of the poem over the course of a day, and even a different poem at different times of the year.

The specific arrangements of the perforations reveal different poems according to the solar calendar: a theme of new-life during the summer solstice. During summer solstice, the poem will contain the theme of “new life”. During winter solstice, the poem will be on “reflection and the passing of time.”

Found on digg.com

The Fall of Tech on digg.com

From readwriteweb.com, an area chart showing the decline of Tech stories made popular on digg.com. Although initially the front page of digg.com was totally dominated by Tech stories and the primary users were tech geeks, the World & Business category is now the reigning king with the most stories made popular.

To put this into context, on 1 January 2006 tech stories made up 78% of the total popular stories (i.e. stories that made it onto the digg frontpage). By end of March 2008, that percentage had dropped to 18-20%.

Here you can see the same information charted as total number of stories made popular instead of percentages.

Map of World Happiness

From geostrategis.com, the world's first map of world happiness.

This world map on happiness was distributed through a Globe and Mail article by Sheryl Ubelacker (28/07/06). It is an interesting perspective, but primarily focused on the social side of well being. It provides a strong visualization but lacks the substance to become a strategic or policy significant map. This map was prepared by Adrian White, University of Leicester

The Growth of Wal*Mart

Great video found on blog.kiwitobes.com that show the store expansion of Wal*Mart starting with the first store in 1962. Based on the publicly available data on freebase.com.

Quake Family Tree

From Wikipedia, the Quake Family Tree shows the history of the Quake computer game engine and all of the other games that were built from each version using a mind map.

Found on digg.com

Treemaps for drive space

I don't think I've posted much about specific software programs, but there are a number of infographic programs that anyone can use. These two are programs that analyze what's on your hard drive, and show it you in a treemap display.

The one above is Disk Inventory X for the Mac (which I use), and the one below is WinDirStat for Windows. Both are free, and are real-life examples of how you can use infographics in your life. So take a minute, and clean off some of that old junk taking up space on your hard drive.

On The Map

Found on notcot.com, On The Map is a cool project by Stefanie Posavec that maps the rhythm and flow of literary works into some stunning visual posters. Breaking a story down into chapters, paragraphs, sentences and finally individual words. Then color coded to capture the topics as they reappear throughout the story. The level of detail is really impressive. Click the images to see the high-resolution images from notcot.com.

Thanks Jonathon and Jason for sending the link.

Stefanie also created a number of additional visualizations of the same story.

A Brief Guide About Bridesmaids

Cool infographic video about (you guessed it) bridesmaids. Created by Yaniv Fridman, Nicolas Alexander and Amber MacKay for Motion Design Class at Vancouver Film School. Here's a link to the High Quality version of the video.

Their blog discusses the creative process and the tools they used to create the video.

Found on infosthetics.com

Who Owns the Organic Food Companies?

Great chart by Phil Howard from Good Magazine showing which of the large food processing companies own some of the most popular organic food brands. Pepsi owns Naked Juice?

Found on digg.com after I heard about it on the diggnation podcast.

Star Wars Toy Collection

Josh Budich has created the website My Star Wars Collection to share his personal collection of over 600 Star Wars figures. He has created a pixel image of each figure in his collection. Moving you mouse over the image brings up the name of the character, and clicking brings up a photo of the figure still in its packaging. The are a number of ways to narrow down the assortment by figure series, movie the character appeared in or year the figure was released.

Thanks Torquil for sending this one in.

Visualizing Pi (π)

Cool little GIF animation to visualize the value of Pi (π) from Wikipedia. Click the image to view the animation.

Found on digg.com