Twitter’s given us the best approximation of a true, measurable “pulse of the globe” that we’ve ever had and in the last few years we’ve have seen some fantastic Twitter visualizations of world events using all sorts of approaches. I thought that this representation of World Cup Fan activity on Twitter that’s currently displayed on the UK Guardian is pretty awesome. It does a great job of conveying a sense of context and captures the spirit and energy of each game. You can replay each game and see a visual representation of crowd reactions in each country as substitutions are made and goals are scored. Sweet. Here are some screenshots…
Watch the crowd in the US erupt as the score is evened up 1-1 in the England-USA game…(a visceral memory for many of us here in the US).
Special thanks to Rob McGuire for the pointer to this visualization project on the UK Guardian!
A common question I get from curious folks who find my blog is “What made you decide to start blogging?”. In an interview I did this week with my Alma Mater I did my best to answer that question
Here’s an excerpt from the interview about how I got into blogging about technology, community and design:
A bit about my blog…
In my second year at CCT I wrote a thesis titled Gaming In Cyberspace: How Interactive Entertainment Is Changing Communication & Identity On The Net . Back then (2004) social media wasn’t really mainstream yet (Facebook was founded in Feb 2004, and our class at Georgetown wasn’t on it until late that year. Twitter didn’t even exist until 2006). For my thesis I did a lot of research on how people interact and communicate in virtual communities – I read a lot on network theory, interaction design and human behavior in digital mediums. I was super interested in this stuff, but back then it didn’t have much practical application because these kinds of virtual communities were so new. Though, I knew huge numbers of people were changing their behavior and gravitating to these communities and that this stuff was going to be big. Quite a few people at CCT thought that I was just a wee bit crazy.
Fast forward to February 2007. I was at a tech conference here in San Diego (O’Reilly’s E-Tech) and was introduced to Twitter. After just a few weeks being on the service, I had bumped into half of the authors that had written books that were the foundation for a few of our core classes at CCT. People like Howard Rheingold (Smart Mobs) and Steven B. Johnson (Interface Culture and Emergence). They all had blogs and were having daily conversations about the stuff I loved. So I started blogging publicly and joining in those conversations. Because I had studied a lot of this stuff at CCT for my thesis and in my courses, I was having great informed conversations with influential people in the tech world. I was having a ball.
I would never have had this access without the exposure to the authors and ideas I was exposed to at CCT. I’ve been having conversations about new media daily online (on blogs and on social media etc) ever since as a full time hobby and it’s opened a lot of doors. I have written for one of the top 10 blogs in the world, ReadWriteWeb, and I’ve been on WSRadio Internet radio here in San Diego several times (recently again last week as a guest host). This month I was nominated for InfluenceSD’s New Media Blogger of the year award (awards take place in April). I didnt plan any of this, it’s just sort of happened organically while I was writing about stuff that I like. Over the last year I’ve also turned the blogging and social media it into a part-time freelance business. I do social media marketing projects with companies and non profits in southern California, which keeps me busy and engaged on nights and weekends…
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I’m excited and honored to have been included in InfluenceSD’s nominees for “Blogger Of The Year” for 2009. InfluenceSD is a San Diego-based awards event created to unite champions in new media. The event celebrates success in social media and the people behind the campaigns and content. The fact that I’ve been recognized in this category by my peers and readers is truly humbling. A heart-felt thank you goes out to everyone out there who reads my stuff and leaves comments on this little blog. You guys make writing a joy for me.
The award winners are decided by your votes, so if you read this blog regularly, I’d really appreciate it if you could help me stay in the running. Voting closes on March 24th. You can register and vote here. :)
Again, thanks to all of you out there who make the conversations we have on this blog what they are. You’re the reason I write.
Back in January I wrote a post discussing why the iPad would be so significant to the future of publishing where I said the following:
“the reading experience itself is going to change…it’s all about the apps… that’s where the real innovation is going to happen, and that’s where consumers are expecting it to happen. They don’t want a crazy new device they have to learn how to use – they want something they know how to use that does new and useful things. The extra screen real estate is exactly what developers have been waiting for, and it’s all they need to change the way we think about reading.”
I stand by what I said – and I think the upheaval we’re about to see in the publishing market is going to be driven by a shift to tablets in general. Once again, the point is that the significance of the iPad isn’t due to the fact that Apple has created something conceptually revolutionary, it’s that they’re in the best position to create a new market and change consumer behavior on a massive scale with what they’re releasing (feel free to debate this point in the comments ;-)).
This afternoon I found this demo (below) of Wired Magazine’s new iPad Table app that made me pretty confident that the way we consume magazines is about to change in a hurry. I’ve seen similar demos like this for magazine-like reading experiences on a tablet (The Mag+ by Bonnier that was demo’d on PopSci immediately comes to mind), but the fact that this is a working demo for the iPad (which hasnt even been released yet!) is pretty significant. I think Chris Anderson’s bit in this speaks volumes about how publishers perceive the opportunities for rich story telling and revenue that the tablet phenomenon presents (not just the iPad, tablets in general). He says…
“This is what we’ve been waiting for, for 15 years. We’ve been waiting for an opportunity to use all these visual tools at our disposal to tell these stories in a way that is efficient, that is multi-dimentional. But we also think it’s an opportunity to reset the economics. For the first time people might value this experience so much that they’ll pay for it.”
Touch Changes The Revenue Game
Chris’ point about resetting the economics for magazines is an important one. We all know that print is on its way out. You’ll notice in the demo that they make the point that advertising is just as important to the consumer’s experience of Wired as the content itself is….but check out how interactive the ads are. It’s a whole different experience. You know why you haven’t seen ads like that on your laptop? Because we don’t touch our screens, that’s why. When you’re encouraged to touch and explore, ads themselves are much closer to interactive content than they are to an object of interruption. The act of touching is literally creating a whole new category for advertising (as content). Now, you couple the opportunities there with the fact that what you’re touching (the magazine) comes in the form of an application that consumers are downloading (easy distribution) and probably paying as much for as they did for the print version…no wonder these guys are excited.
Considering this is a working demo for a product that hasn’t even been released yet, I’m pretty excited to see what other players are doing. Apple was smart to give developers a window to get going between the official announcement and the actual release date. If this is the beginning, this is a really exciting time to be in publishing.
I can think of so many reasons why this is a good idea. If this startup can get the security and authentication right with this (and they seem to have) they’re going to make a killing. Check out Squareup for launch details.
