SXSW Twitter Visualizer from Pepsi

The 2009 SXSW PepsiCo Zeitgeist Twitter Visualizer (long name isn't it?) was a great experiment during the 5-day South By Southwest symposium/conference/party in Austin, TX.  Developed by Slash7, the site contains a number of dufferent visualizations using the Twitter APIs.

These real-time visualizations were able to capture only Tweets about the event using the hash-tag #SXSW and highlight the popular topics and show where people were Twittering on a map.  PepsiCo has a bigger site with some additional content at http://pepsico.com/sxsw

Found on Information Aesthetics and of course, Twitter.

VizThink Europe Discount Code!

I know many of my readers would really enjoy the conference VizThink Europe, and the conference is coming up quickly.  The Europe version is in Berlin, Germany this year on October 12-14 at Crown Plaza Berlin City Centre.

We'll have lots of opportunities for hands on experiences, learning from industry gurus, and networking with your visual thinking peers. We'll be bringing a few of your favorite facilitators from San Francisco with all new content, plus a whole lot of new facilitators from Europe.

The great guys at VizThink have created a discount code for readers of Cool Infographics.  Use the code BCRK01 when you register to get €50 ($75-$80 in U.S. dollars these days) off any regular attendance fee (not student, Government or non-profit rates).

If you can get to Berlin (and I have a lot of readers from Europe), you would really get a lot from attending.

Big thanks to the guys at VizThink!

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

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.

17 Ways to Visualize Twitter

Also from FlowingData.com, this post about the many ways to visualize the Twitter universe is really cool. Twitter has really been gaining some momentum lately, but I keep looking for better ways to follow the posts.

Digg These Pics

Really cool new feature over on Digg.com. Back in late 2007, they added an Images category so users could digg their favorite pictures. Now they've added an interactive image viewer in the Digg Labs that lets you see new images and pictures being dugg in real-time.

The only thing I don't like is that it doesn't let you add any search terms. You have to see all of the activity, and can't narrow it down it all.

Disneyland Wait Time

Traveling in California this last week kept me from being able to post. But here's a real-life infographic from Disneyland in Anaheim, CA. At the entrance to each separate attraction, is a posted wait time estimate, but they are all combined on this information board in the center of the park.

Not willing to wait an hour for the new Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage? Pick a handful of other rides that you can get through in the same amount of time and maximize the money you spent getting into the park.

Flight Explorer Snapshot

Reader submission (thanks Karen).

On the NATCA (National Air Traffic Controllers Association) website is this U.S. map showing every airline flight currently in the air. The information is delayed by 5 minutes. Also, the graphic isn't interactive, so you can see any information about the dots (like which flight it is).


You can also zoom into nine select cities to see the flights in the air and the flight numbers. So the next time you're lying in the grass with your kids (in one of the major cities) looking up at the sky, you could (if you wanted to) figure out where that airplane is going.

See also: Flight Patterns

WiFi Detector T-Shirt

Another one for the "real world" infographics. This t-shirt from ThinkGeek will detect WiFi 802.11b or 802.11g wireless networks and display their signal strength on the front of the shirt. A great Christmas present for the geek in your family, for only $30.

It will amuse you, that I caught this one from Guy Kawasaki on Twitter.com, which linked to Truemors.com, which linked to BoingBoing.com, which linked to BoingBoingGadgets which finally linked to the original page on ThinkGeek.com. What a tangled web we weave...

Breathing Earth

Breathing Earth is a cool website that displays international statistics in real-time, similar in concept to Poodwaddle.com's World Counter. Breathing Earth focuses on carbon dioxide emissions by country and adds population, births and deaths.

Welcome to Breathing Earth. This presentation displays the carbon dioxide emission levels of every country in the world, as well as their birth and death rates - all in real-time. Though considerable effort has been taken to ensure that the presentation uses the most accurate and up-to-date data available, please remember that this is just a simulation.

Breathing Earth was created by David Bleja (aka Stillwater), whose home website is stillwater-microcosm.net

Found on SimpleComplexity.net

Speedtest.net

Speedtest.net does a great job showing you the data while testing your own internet connection speed. From locating a test server on the map, to animating the speedometer as the test runs. Without much text at all explaining what's going on, you understand the test, and the results.

Then you get the code to embed your results (see below) into a blog post, email or website. How fast is your connection?

The Bloomberg Makeover

Three design firms took on the challenge of re-designing the Bloomberg terminal interface, and the results were fantastic. The challenge came from Portfolio.com. The original article is here, but the fantasy terminals are here with an interactive interface that lets you highlight and zoom in on particular features. The design above is from thehappycorp.com and is my personal favorite.

Bloomberg claims to be constantly improving their interface design, but it still looks like runs on DOS and is straight out of the 80's.


Here is the desing from IDEO.com:


And one from Ziba.com:

Marumushi News Map

Marumushi.com has a fantastic News Map using the treemap visualization style. This is one of the best implementations of a treemap that I have found. Updated every 6 hours, it groups news stories (from the Google news aggregator) by overall category (technology, world, sports, etc.). You can choose to show the news map from 11 different countries, and the color shading of each block represents how old that particular news story is. Hovering your mouse over any square shows the whole title, and clicking takes you directly to the story.

Microsoft Car HUD

Found on arstechnica.com, this one has me really excited. I have been disappointed for at least two decades that real HUDs (Heads-Up Displays) have not become standard, or even available as a third party product for our cars. Now a US patent application from Microsoft has been published showing a possible future HUD for your car.

More than just your speed, with today's technology we should have things like incoming caller-id, compass direction, outside temperature, current playing music title, live GPS map and distance to the car in front of us showing around the edges of our windshields.

We can only cross our fingers and hope that this would some day become a reality.

VizThink Conference 2008

Early registration to the VizThink 2008 conference will end on September 15th. The conference is in San Francisco Jan 27-29. I won't be able to attend, but I hear that this is a great conference for people who make a living creating visual presentations, infographics, brainstorming sketches, etc.

Out friend David Gray from XPLANE is one of the conference facilitators (speakers).

A big THANKS to the folks at VizThink for adding a link to Cool Infographics on their VizThink Blog!

World Clock Counter

You've seen these counters on highway billboards and other websites before. The World Clock from poodwaddle.com combines many of these counters together into one dashboard.

I've added a smaller version to the bottom of the right pane here on on the blog.

Visual Tire Pressure

Infographics don't have to be complicated. This is a very simple, real-world example of an infographic system to monitor the tire pressure on your car called Accu-Pressure Caps. A set of four gauges screw onto your tire's valve stems, and the air pressure pushes the green indicator completely out. As tire pressure begins to drop, so does the green indicator revealing a yellow indicator, and ultimately the red indicator. The key here is to buy the set of caps to match the tire pressure you want to maintain on your car.

An alternative is from aviationupgrade.com, which is a battery operated version. These always start with the tire pressure when you screw them on, and when the pressure drops by 4psi the LED light on the end starts blinking to get your attention.

2008 Presidential Campaign Finances

This interactive infographic from the New York Times website is really impressive. Using weekly data reported by the Federal Election Commission, it plots the contributions on a map of the U.S. and sizes the bubbles based on contributions from that city. It has data from every week since January 1st, so it will also "play" and animated version showing the contribution as time progresses (similar to the Trendalyzer that Google purchased from GapMinder).

You can also search for specific contributors to see which candidate campaigns they have contributed to, and how much they gave.

Jonathan Harris TED Talks 2007

Jonathan Harris is working on some cool, interesting, fascinating but weird stuff. This is his presentation at TED 2007 about We Are Fine and his new project Universe. You can see this on the TED site here.

Universe is now live at universe.daylife.com, and you can enter a news topic and watch it graphically associate all of the relevant stories in the media about that topic. This would be really cool for consumer products too, but sadly that doesn't exist.

The TED Talks are now available on iTunes as free video podcasts. I've been watching some older ones from 2002-2007.

Digg Swarm

If you don't read Digg...shame on you.

For the rest of us, Digg has become an incredibly valuable source of information. But paging through pages of text for something to catch your eye gets old quick.

Digg Swarm was launched in 2006, and I have increasingly used it more and more since then. It has really grown on me. You can watch in real-time stories that get "Dugg" to become more popular. The visual size of the story bubble grows as the story's popularity grows. The yellow dots connected to the story show you who is digging the story, and the size of the yellow dot shows you how important that user is in the Digg universe.

Also, if the same person Diggs two stories, a connecting line is shown to highlight other story bubbles that may interest you. The connecting line between two stories gets thicker as more users Digg the same two stories showing a stronger connection.

Usually I start it up and let it run for a little while before I check it out. That way it has some time to build up some connections and story history. It starts from scratch when you start, so you only see the stories that are Dugg from that point in time and after.