Showing posts with label visualization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label visualization. Show all posts
Thursday, March 06, 2008
Microsoft's Silverlight at Hard Rock
Online interactive applications that allow you to consume and interact with data visually always impress me. As a user, i just think it is cool and it distracts me from the boring text blobs i am mostly interacting with. But as someone concerned with delivering all types information types to users, i am also always curious because i know that these technologies will continue to enhance information delivery and how users will expect to interact with data regardless if they are at work or play.I was catching up on the Mix08 news this evening and saw this live site of Microsoft's Silverlight Deep Zoom technology that allows users to browse photos of Hard Rock's multimedia collection.This gets filed in the cool folder.
Aside from being able to zoom in on the promo wig from the Rolling Stones 'Some Girls' album you can also zoom into Keith Richard's strange Italian Guitar with built in speaker and Bob Dylan's 1991 Harley Davidson Soft Tail Custom Motorcycle among a lot of items of interest.
I wonder if there is plan to overlay music as well- perhaps an integration with some of the online music providers would be interesting. It however doesn't seem to be indexed by their search tool because i did a search on Bob Dylan and the motorcycle did not come up although other Dylan memorabilia did - the text is there within the object description (putting aside the topic of image search itself) so maybe that is just an oversight on their part at the moment.
Friday, March 16, 2007
Google acquires Gapminder- great when can i have it for creating client presentations?
Yet another acquisition announced today by Google. This time Gapminder's Trendalyzer software.
"Make sense of the world by having fun with statistics" the Gapminder site tells us- ok i am in and want to have some fun.
I just watched the TED 2006 presentation by Hans Rosling founder of Gapminer and could imagine the Google people in the audience thinking hey- how do we get this on board with our strategy. During the presentation Rosling uses the Gapminder software to present the developing world including interesting data on an economic, heath and political perspective- all great but it is the visualization tools that is driving the presentation and that is why Google just snapped them up.
During the video Rosling calls for the end of boring statics- alleluia! and for linking data to design- double alleluia!!
Rosling sees a lot happening in data in the next few years- yes thanks to this Google acquisition i see it also- taking the data visualization tools and delivering it to the end user not power users- just like what they did to the search industry.
In the video he says that students and policy makers get very excited when they see the promise of data visualization? hey you know what, i am very excited about a potential tool that as a corporate user i can use to tell a story.
So what i would like to know?
"Make sense of the world by having fun with statistics" the Gapminder site tells us- ok i am in and want to have some fun.
I just watched the TED 2006 presentation by Hans Rosling founder of Gapminer and could imagine the Google people in the audience thinking hey- how do we get this on board with our strategy. During the presentation Rosling uses the Gapminder software to present the developing world including interesting data on an economic, heath and political perspective- all great but it is the visualization tools that is driving the presentation and that is why Google just snapped them up.
During the video Rosling calls for the end of boring statics- alleluia! and for linking data to design- double alleluia!!
Rosling sees a lot happening in data in the next few years- yes thanks to this Google acquisition i see it also- taking the data visualization tools and delivering it to the end user not power users- just like what they did to the search industry.
In the video he says that students and policy makers get very excited when they see the promise of data visualization? hey you know what, i am very excited about a potential tool that as a corporate user i can use to tell a story.
So what i would like to know?
- How hard is it to create these visualizations? do they even know how long i spend doing slide decks to not even get to 1% of the powerful story Rosling is presenting in this video. Oh wait- wasn't there some recent buzz about a Google PowerPoint Clone coming soon?
Marisa Mayer says more information will be made available soon. (On a aside-i will be at BlogHer next week and hope to finally meet her).
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Web Application for creating tag clouds
Robert Berkman from the Intelligent Agent Blog, loves tag clouds. I agree with him that tagclouds can be used effectively to tell a story for business researchers among others in the enteprise who are responsible for redistributing or presenting information . His post points us to a site called TagCrowd . According to the site, TagCrowd is a web application for visualizing word frequencies in any user-supplied text by creating what is popularly known as a tag cloud. It is very easy to use and configurable even by creating a stop word list. I have a couple of uses for it already including some upcoming client presentations.
These tagclouds that TagCrowd produces are looking at word frequencies and not neccissarily what the text has been tagged with (unless you include the metadata in the text box). There are some other tagcloud makers that look at what tags have been applied.
I recently re-read this white paper on Getting Started with Controlled Vocabularies, Taxonomies and Thesauri so for fun, i through the text into TagCrowd to produce the following:
These tagclouds that TagCrowd produces are looking at word frequencies and not neccissarily what the text has been tagged with (unless you include the metadata in the text box). There are some other tagcloud makers that look at what tags have been applied.
I recently re-read this white paper on Getting Started with Controlled Vocabularies, Taxonomies and Thesauri so for fun, i through the text into TagCrowd to produce the following:
application being cases companies controlled core data developing edit existing files implementing imported information management metadata prot support system taxonomy used user values vocabulary workflow
created at TagCrowd.com
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