After all the Twitter articles, reports, and sociology last week I thought it might be a good idea to focus on something a little lighter. Here are three Twitter visualizations that are fun and, maybe, useful.
1. Trendsmap. This visualization tracks Twitter trends by geographical location and displays the information as a tag cloud on a Google Map, which can be sorted by a specific city or general region in real time. Clicking on a tag opens a small information box that aggregates the latest tweets, the trend history, and offers related news links and images.
2. Visible Tweets. Visible Tweets displays a stream of tweets on any trend you choose. They are displayed one at a time on a colourful background, with beautiful transitions between tweets. Designed to display tweets in a public place, a perfect addition to any twittered conference.
3. Trend Tracker. While the others focus on place or aesthetics, Trend Tracker allows you to see trending topics by geography and time of day. It is also possible to see a trend topic by location on a world map over 24 hours, which means you can follow trends as they travel around the globe.
Wildcard. TwittEarth. Displays a geo-located tweet, accompanied by a very bizarre icon, at ten second intervals. Useless but strangely seductive.
One. Google Maps will now be displaying live traffic data for more roads, not just the major highways. While it is clear that they are still working on the technology and its application, it gives us a good idea of what will be possible in the future as real time, mobile technology, and location based applications develop.
Two. A Ph.D thesis “Passion at work: blogging practices of knowledge worker” by Lilia Efimova.
By describing the practices of knowledge workers who blog, this research provides a view into the changing nature of work that becomes increasingly digital, nomadic and networked. It shows the power of individual knowledge workers, who bypass existing authorities and use their networks to stay informed and to get things done. It documents the blurred boundaries between what is personal and what is professional, as well as the growing need to know how to deal with transparency and fragmentation of one’s work.
Three. Bruce Sterling’s keynote, “At the Dawn of the Augmented Reality Industry“, presented at the launch of the Layar Reality Browser. Just watch it!
Wildcard. Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit from the MIT Museum, created by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab.
It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you. Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.
And in case you want to know what the final outcome looks like, here is my online Persona.
