David Feldt Proud father. Entrepreneur. Builder. Catalyst. Accelerator. Guide.

A Bird’s Eye View of the Market

I'm currently obsessed with data visualization.

Quoting from Wikipedia:

The main goal of data visualization is to communicate information clearly and effectively through graphical means. It doesn’t mean that data visualization needs to look boring to be functional or extremely sophisticated to look beautiful. To convey ideas effectively, both aesthetic form and functionality need to go hand in hand, providing insights into a rather sparse and complex data set by communicating its key-aspects in a more intuitive way. Yet designers often tend to discard the balance between design and function, creating gorgeous data visualizations which fail to serve its main purpose — communicate information.

Yesterday, Organic posted a wonderful list of data visualization examples and I've been enthralled by Wordle which creates very elegant "word clouds."

Today, I discovered another wonderful example of elegant data visualization - It's Smartmoney's Map of the Market which provides a real-time, bird's eye view of the entire market. It cleverly uses color to highlight the market segments which are up or down on the day. Beneath the surface is tons more data that you can drill down into, including news reports, market analysis, charts and competitive financial metrics. For me, it provides the perfect balance between design and function in communicating the exact information I need.

 http://www.smartmoney.com/map-of-the-market/

Words painting a picture

Tag clouds have been around for a while. I just found a really beautiful example that builds a "word cloud" visual representation of a piece of copy you enter or of a website.

Here's how it represented this blog:

Using our hands

The New York Times has an interesting article about a group of Adobe designers who spent a day using their hands (and not their computers) to design. The majority of designers are using simulation and virtual representation to design. Its time to apply a more balanced approach to design utilizing the tactile, God-given tools we all have - our hands.

Citizen Journalism via Twitter Gave Me Peace of Mind

On Sunday morning I woke up at 4am to the sounds of what I thought was bombing! I guess I was dreaming about the Soviet / Georgian bombings and awoke in that reality. Then my mind told me I was in "Safe Toronto" but I still felt anxious as the sounds continued.

I switched on the radio - nothing.
I switched on the TV - nothing.
I went to Google and searched for any news on Toronto - nothing.

Then I reached for my Blackberry and sent out the series of Tweets above. Looking on Twitter Search led me to PhotoJunkie and to Youtube videos and Flickr photos.

This episode in Toronto sparked a great commentary by Jeremiah Owyang on the risks and opportunities of citizen journalism.

Dave Lougheed commented on how "Twitter scoops local news."

Last week, the use of Twitter to report the L.A. earthquakes inspired Organic's Mike Hudson to write an article about his experiences. Mike held a different view, in which, he found the phone a more useful tool for his crisis:

"While we all look to the Twitter, text and Facebook or whatever else as the 'next' way of doing things, I'd say the real hero of breaking news is consistently turning out to be the biggest dinosaur of them all, the phone."

But in my case... at 5am, I went back to sleep, feeling way less anxious now that I was better informed. The traditional media were all still asleep! They finally woke up hours later and started reporting on the events. Empowered by Twitter, Youtube and Flickr, I was able to express my anxiety with the World, poll the community to find out more, share information and be educated by and be part of citizen journalism on Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.

Growing Up on Google

There have been recent discussions about the effect that Google is having on us and it's negative impact on our ability to remember information, our ability to think deeply about things and to focus and concentrate.

My 6 3/4 yr old daughter has given me a very different view into the next information / knowledge age and how different it is from the world I grew up in.  Over the past six months she's started to use the Internet a lot more frequently and recently started searching Youtube and Google for her favorite Hannah Montana videos, fashion designs and African animals (elephants, giraffe, lions and rhinos.)

Increasingly she's started to spend extended periods of time in front of the computer learning new things, not just playing games or watching videos.  Today she spent 60+ minutes exploring the wonderful world of African Rain Spiders.  I watched her use Google, Wikipedia and blogs to read about these spiders, look at images of them and imbibe a huge amount of knowledge.

Her ability to regularly perform a thorough search and retain focus and knowledge contradicts the current view that we are now no longer able to concentrate, focus and learn in this multitasking / continuous partial attention world.  Her mind is obviously able to deal with the hyperlinked world a lot better than her dad's.

I'll be learning from her in the future.