Pardon my dust - Cool Infographics is changing

Please accept my apologies for any problems you may have reading Cool Infographics for the next few days.  I'm taking some time over the holidays to move the Cool Infographics blog to a new host, since traffic is really low during this time.

What you, the reader, should expect from the new site:

• The URL, www.coolinfographics.com, will stay the same.  You don't need to change your bookmarks at all (unless you're still using the old URL: coolinfographics.blogspot.com).
• If you use an RSS reader, that will stay the same also, so no changes should be necessary
• With the new site, I'll be able to offer some additional value-added services like an updated design, an infographics job board, how-to design infographics features,  an infographics bookstore, infographic software and links to infographics posters available for purchase.

You feedback on these changes is very welcome.  So please feel free to use the contact page in the new site design to let me know what you like or don't like.

Send your own Augmented Reality Christmas Cards!

Merry Christmas from Cool Infographics!

What better way to share your Christmas wishes than with augmented reality?!?  You can send your own AR Christmas cards courtesy of arwishes.com.  You can choose from an assortment of animated images that will appear on screen when you friends and family hold up your Christmas card in front of their computer's webcam.

The cards are printed with the marker, disguised as a holiday image.  In this case, the marker is obviously the Christmas Tree.

A number of companies did this last year, sending out cards with an AR marker printed as part of the card, and a number of them are still online.  You can also print out a card from the sites to see the image yourself.  There will probably be a few more this holiday season as well, but here are some videos from last year's AR cards and links to sites if you want to experience them yourself.

Specialmoves.com:

Special Moves Augmented Reality Xmas Card from Iain Tait on Vimeo.


TellArt:


Tellart 2008 Holiday Card from Tellart on Vimeo.


Stella Artois:



Total Immersion:




There's even a video of sending your own AR Christmas Cookies!

Cool Infographics 2.0 BETA

Exciting things are happening around here!  Watch closely in the next couple of weeks for a bunch of changes to Cool Infographics!  I'll also post about the changes as they happen on Twitter.

Step 1: Cool Infographics now has a new URL address:  www.coolinfographics.com

Please change your bookmarks to the new address.  The old URL address, coolinfographics.blogspot.com, will keep working for a few weeks, but eventually will go away.

If you use an RSS reader, nothing changes.  The RSS feed doesn't change so you don't have to do anything.

Step 2: Watch for the design changes in the next few weeks (like the new logo above!).  I've got some big plans for Cool Infographics.

Sounds easy with only two steps doesn't it?  That's because I get to do all of the work.

Thanks to everyone for reading and subscribing!

Motionbox PRO discount & Roku Box Giveaway

Motionbox is an online service to share video content that allows you more control over who can view your content.  They are also a video hosting service that allows you to embed video on your own site with a clean, "white label" player without any watermarks, ads or branding from the video site (like YouTube, Vimeo, etc.)

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NOVEMBER GIVEAWAY: Anyone who signs up for a free account in the month of November (one week left!) can enter into the giveaway of 3 Roku HD players.  If you're not familiar, the Roku Box connects to your TV and allows you to stream video from the Internet to you TV, including HD content.  Official Rules are here.

All you have to do is sign up for a FREE Motionbox account before November 30, 2009 then email offers@motionbox.com with subject line "Roku Giveaway" and we'll enter your name for a chance to win a Roku HD  Player. 

Also, for any readers interested in signing up for the PRO account, the $50 setup fee will be refunded.  Once you’ve set up your account, send an email to offers@motionbox.com with offer code PROblogger2009 and they will set up your refund.

A special gift for you and your readers: From now until the end of the year, sign up for a Motionbox PRO account, and we’ll refund your $49.99 set up fee! 

Motionbox PRO provides small businesses, pro bloggers, and commercial content producers with a comprehensive video hosting solution. PRO service includes archival storage, web-based editing, streaming and embedding, all in superior quality, up to 1080p HD.

Thanks to Lowell for setting this up for readers of Cool Infographics!

Visual Map of 30 Free Online Promotion Websites

Great visual map of the connections between free online sites to promote your content.  Made by Chris Watson at Visualization Magazine.

This visualisation was made to help inform and advertise on how easily and effectively you can use the web 2.0 tools to build an online presence through free sites, feeds, embed and monitor progress/stats.

Chris also has links to all of these icons in his post in case you want to create your own Web 2.0 visual.

Webpages As Graphs - Cool HTML visualizer applet

Marcel Salathe has created Webpages As Graphs, an interactive HTML DOM visualizer applet that will view any http:// website in a graphic form.  The image above is Cool Infographics, but the arrangement comes out a little different every time you run it.

Using Processing, Traer Physics and HTMLParser the site lets you enter the domain and then watch while it works its magic.  He has also made the source code available and instructions to print your graph as a poster.

HTML consists of so-called tags, like the A tag for links, IMG tag for images and so on. Since tags are nested in other tags, they are arranged in a hierarchical manner, and that hierarchy can be represented as a graph. I've written a little app that visualizes such a graph

I ran it for a number of other websites to see the differences, some were inspired by the examples on Marcel's site.

Amazon.com: Pretty complex site with lots of links, images and tables.

Apple.com: Simple design, as you expect from Apple.

Google.com:  Known for their clean front page.

LifeHacker.com:  Great blog with a very complex structure.

Found on VisualCompexity.com

Collaborative, Online Mind Map about Mind Mapping Software

I know, that's a mouthful of a title.  MindMeister is an online, collaborative mind mapping tool that lets multiple users edit a common mind map.  Essentially, its a visual wiki, that allows anyone to makes changes to the data, but you need to be logged in so that it can track who makes the changes.

Andrew Wilcox has created a public mind map with the catchy title "The Strengths and Weaknesses of Mind Mapping Software Applications".  You can see all of the different mind mapping software packages, the pros and cons of each one, and add your own comments.

Your voice can still be heard, a few of the software applications don't have any comments at all yet.  They need people to help add information to the map.

Found on the Mind Mapping Software Blog, by Chuck Frey

Also, MindMeister has an iPhone app that allows you to view and edit online mind maps from your iphone.  It's $6.99US in the iTunes App Store.  

Check Out Your Own Online DNA - Visually

Check out Personas, an interactive, online DNA visualizer.  You enter your own name (or anyone's name for that matter) and watch the system as it categorizes you from online searches.  I've displayed my own DNA above.  The types of attributes it associates with your name are based on the text it finds in the search results.

As you watch Personas analyze the search results you can see that in my case, it doesn't differentiate between me and the other Randy Krums of the world, so our attributes are blended together into one common DNA.

Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.  Upon entering a name, it scours the Internet looking for characterizing statements to use in its analysis.  After suitable information has been found, the viewer watches as the machine tries to make sense of the displayed text.  Once it has reached its final conclusions, the resulting "Personas vector" is displayed and annotated with a minimal legend.

Personas is just one part of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, now currently on display at the MIT Museum through September 2009 (it needs a new home!).  Metropath(ologies) is a participatory installation about living in a world overflowing with information and non-stop communication, a world in which you are simultaneously the audience and the subject.  It is deliberately ambiguous about the desirability of this communication abundance, riding the line between serene and sinister.

Found on VisualThinkMap.

Balance Your Media Diet (The Media Pyramid Infographic)

From Wired Magazine's "New Rules for Highly Evolved Humans" section of the August 2009 issue.

Practicing good nutrition keeps your mind sharp, your body fit, and your life long. The same could be said for consuming media. (Seriously, knowledge is power.) When you add it all up, the average American spends roughly nine hours a day glued to some kind of screen, and like your diet, quality is as important as quantity. Here areWired's suggested servings for optimal media health.

Found on Nathan's Flowingdata.com

reMap: An Amazing Visual Browsing Interface to VisualCompexity.com

Bestario has created reMap, an interactive portal to view all of the infographics posted on VisualComplexity.com, and it's amazing.  They've created semantic connection between the different infographics using tags tat allow for an incredible browsing experience.

An interactive, visual browsing interface to an infographic archive.

reMap displays visualcomplexity.com projects allowing navigation using a semantic approach and depicting relations among them. All images and texts belong to vc portal. Tags are assigned using a semantic engine created by Bestiario.

Thanks Jose!  I love it!

Create Your Own Facebook Network Graph

Create a graph of your own network of friends on Facebook with Nexus.  You've seen many visuals of Twitter and Facebook connections, but this one is especially cool because it's your own network.  That's my network chart is above, but you don't care about mine...go create your own!

Found on Twitter

Amazon Acquisitions infographic

Found on meettheboss.com, a decent infographic of the acquisitions that Amazon.com has made over the years.  Drawn like an org chart, I like that each branch represents another year, so it becomes a timeline.

Skirt Lengths on Flickr + infographic tutorial

Wendy Ding created this infographic in 2007, and recently published a complete tutorial on how she created it on Digital Arts.

After collecting data on skirt lengths and their wearers and locations from flickr.com, this information piece was created to illustrate the statistics. A bar graph, area map with call-outs, and a legend all come together to explain the skirt wearers relationship.

This piece garnered an honourable mention from the 2007 Adobe Design Contest for the digital illustration category.

Thanks for sharing Wendy!

The Story (so far) of Twitter

Graphic designed for Manolith.com, by infoshot.  It's a reverse timeline of Twitter.

Twitter, Twitter, Twitter. Seems every where you turn these days that little blue bird is staring you right in the face. But how did it all start? Where is it all going? Who’s to say really, except you I suppose, in 140 character bursts. In the meantime let’s take a look back on some milestones of microblogging.  Please do enjoy, The Story (so far) of Twitter. Start at the bottom and work your way up on this one.

Of course, I found this on Twitter!

The Conversation Prism 2.0 has been released!

Check out the new version of The Conversation Prism 2.0 by JESS3 and Brian Solis and theconversationprism.com.  Available as a poster for $20 US on thier website, and they also have some high-resolution versions available.

I love the design of this one.  It's seems to be essentially a mind map, but much easier to read and understand.

This is an update to the original Conversation Prism that you can see here on Flickr.

Thanks Dana!  I found the link to the 1.0 version on ON:Digital+Marketing

Web Trend Map 4.0

The great team at InformationArchitects.com released their updated version of the Web Trend Map 4. (They should call it 4.0)   You can buy it as a poster for $49 from their website, or they have also made a high-resolution version available.

iA's Web Trend Map plots the leading Internet names onto the Tokyo Metro system.

Paying attention to the intersections, we grouped associated websites and ensured every domain is on a line that suits it.  As a result, the map produces a web of associations: some provocative, some curious, others ironically accurate.

Why Tokyo Metro?  Because it works.

You Need to Get Seadragon!

If you haven't checked it out yet, you need to take a look at Seadragon.  I know its from Microsoft, but I like it anyway!  Seadragon is a software project to allow users to browse and zoom into high-resolution images.  I'm especially attached to the iPhone version of Seadragon Mobile (link opens iTunes) available for free from iTunes!

One of the best things about the iPhone version is that it includes some example images, and includes some of the work from Chris Jordan.  Longtime readers of the blog know I really like Chris Jordan's series "Running the Numbers" which uses high-resolution images to visually show the viewer statistical information about how we live.

Get Your Geek Chart!

Rtkrum's Geek Chart

Recently I found the Geek Charts BETA, which looks up your usernames on a few of the popular social sites, and charts out your usage. It's charting all activity within the last 30 days.

The embedded chart is also live, so it will change over time.

The Amazon Book Map

Now this is impressive.  Chris Harrison has created the Amazon Book Map using data scraped from Amazon and which books Amazon thinks are related to each other.

Aaron Swartz, who runs theinfo.org, contacted me back in January '08 with an interesting data set. He had built a list of 735,323 books by crawling Amazon. Of course a gigantic list is pretty boring, but Aaron had also captured similarity data between books. In particular, he had amassed a whopping 10,316,775 connections (edges) between books Amazon believed were related. This allowed me to throw the data into my old wikiviz engine to spatially layout a huge mosaic of books (I let it run for a 140 hours). Items that were noted as being similar had attractive forces, bringing them together, often into large groups. Unsurprisingly, when we color coded by Amazon book category, there was an obvious coalescence. The way various high-level categorizations mix and meet also seems fairly logical.

I produced a few versions of what I am dubbing the Amazon Book Map. The first visualization is a huge mosaic of book covers, tinted by their respective category colors. I can't produce this in one go at full resolution because the memory requires are enormous. The second version uses color-coded dots. 

As you zoom into the image, you can see its built using the book cover images with a color overlay depicting the category of the book.

Thanks to @anniesmidt on Twitter for the link to this one!

What is Wolfram|Alpha?

I'm not sure I understand what Wolfram|Alpha is yet, but so far it's pretty impressive.  Developed by Stephen Wolfram and his team, it claims to be a "computational knowledge engine".  The input box looks like a search engine, but it is definitely NOT a search engine.

When you type in a question, it attempts to show you all of the relevant data it can find.  It is actually calculating and charting this information real-time in order to present it to you.  Because its built on top of the Mathematica Engine, it can also handle math problems.

I think this will be an important tool for many designers of infographics, because you can get some of your raw data directly from Wolfram|Alpha.  As they add more data into the system over time, this will become one of your best resources for information.  They have a pretty extensive page of examples by category that is a great place to start.  Also watch the short video by Stephen Wolfram showing what the system can do.