Hashtagart Turns Twitter Profile Pics Into Beautiful Mosaic Art

Hashtagart creates elaborate mosaic art out of Twitter users' profile pictures:"Hashtagart has proprietary technology and a suite of apps that make it fun for consumers to spread a brand's message. Consumers are no longer advertised to, they BECOME the advertisement, and they have fun connecting with the brand."

The images above are 11am and 5pm  screengrabs from a new Dark Knight movie teaser done with hashtagart's Mosaic app. Check out their other projects for Roku, Window Phone 7, and MSNBC 2010 election coverage.

Branded Music Visualization Plug-In for Land Rover

I last wrote about branded WinAmp visualizations five years ago and haven't heard much since until today when I saw the Land Rover team released a visualization plug-in for Windows Media Player.
-- via

Re: On Infographics and Chartoonery

Just saw Noah's post about infographics where he is writing about "the entire phenomenon of turning a whole bunch of information into a pretty, but mostly incomprehensible, picture and presenting it to the world."

I've done my share of data collection and presentation;  some of the stuff is fairly complex with hundreds of data points packed in one image, other stuff is more like this classic parody from Flowing Data. What I have found out is that both forms have their place. The latter, or as Tufte put it, "chartoonery", has been useful when:

-- When I want my data to make a point quickly, and when I want the data to be self-sustaining and not require someone's voice-over.
-- When I have a presentation and the pages of supporting data are customarily stuck in the "appendix" that nobody ever reads, a "chartoon" works as a lot more attractive and usable summary of the findings.
--  When I have data I want people to share with others, they are a lot more likely to pass around a single image than raw tables or decks with pages of Excel charts.  "Chartoons" are also easier to embed into a blog post.
-- When people want to keep a set of data handy for continuous reference, they are more likely to print out (and even hang on their wall; true story) a "chartoon" poster than a bunch of PowerPoint slides.
-- When I am sick of looking at raws of numbers, fumbling with fonts and laying things out on a page is a  calming exercise not unlike doing dishes.

So it's about the end justifying the means, really.

Fundamentally, I don't disagree with Noah. It's amusing and mildly irritating that some of the shallowest, ugliest and often inaccurate junk that is passed for infographics these days eclipses in popularity the truly outstanding work (here's one example) that may take weeks to build. But that really shouldn't influence how we choose our own tools, right?

Speaking of tools, have you seen tagxedo.com? It's like Wordle on steroids.

Telling A Story With Fantasy Interfaces

Here's a recent quick interview on NPR with Mark Coleran, the designer behind FUI (fictional user interfaces) that have appeared in many well-known movies: "What [a movie character] sees on that monitor looks nothing like what you have on your home computer. That's because it wasn't designed to surf the Internet or do your taxes."

AdLab's earlier coverage of Mark Coleran's work and the subject of FUI, including an academic paper.

Hype Cycle 2009: Augmented Reality, 3D TV on the Rise

If you think there's too much talk about augmented reality these days, the good news is that you are not alone, and the bad news is that it's far from over. Gartner has released its latest and retweaked "Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2009" report, and AR is right there, climbing steadily towards the Peak of Inflated Expectations (definition).  One change from the last year's graph is the estimate of years to mainstream adoption: from "more than 10 years" to "5-10".

I haven't read the complete report, so I'm making this up, which I shouldn't, but plenty of surprises in this edition: 3D printing doesn't really feel quite so hyped yet to be that far up the slope; ditto mobile robots (?). And what's Behavioral Economics doing there?  If we graph theories, shouldn't the "Free" movement be there as well?

And has Tablet PC already passed the trough of Trough of Disillusionment? (Or there must be a separate graph for Apple's tablet. Does a tech actually need to exist to march through the complete cycle?)  What about electronic paper?

Speaking of 3D flat-panels:  Sky is planning to launch a 3D channel in Britain, just for those 3D-ready TVs.

Human augmentation sounds pretty cool. 

If you are a fan of the hype cycle approach, there's a recently published book [ref. url] on the subject written by two Gartner analysts; one of them, Mark Raskino, left a comment here last year.

Create Sparklines with Excel Plugin

If you are a fan of Tufte's sparklines, TinyGraphs is a free plugin that adds them to your Excel spreadsheets.

Update: after further digging, found a bit more:
- Another, paid but more versatile tool called Sparkmaker
- And a browser plugin called jQuery
- A way to do heatmaps in Excel
- a blog on the subject, Clearly and Simply

Graph: Credibility of Popular Business Theories Over Time

- via Chris Anderson's

Diagrams in Anthropology and Linguistics

A collection of "Great Diagrams in Anthropology, Linguistics, and Social Theory" on Flickr.

CNN "Hologram" and Other Studio Gadgetry

Wired runs an overview of the heavy gadgetry trotted out by networks during last night's elections coverage. The CNN's "hologram" was not a hologram at all, unfortunately, but we have to admit that this "via hologram" sounds pretty awesome. Here's a similar effect of "telepresence" as demonstrated by Cisco.

MSNBC's 3D set-up from Brainstorm was pretty cool, too.

Loved the virtual capitol on CNN:  "The "virtual Capitol" is newer, and so perhaps cooler. I'm standing in the studio looking at an empty desk, and glance up at a monitor and see how a full model of the Capitol building has somehow been dropped on top of that desk (which is still empty). Then you can open the top of the Capitol (don't try this at home) and see how the seats are being won and lost as the night goes on." (source )



Video of the virtual capitol.

Video: first time via hologram!

Media History Through Gartner Hype Cycle Graphs: 1995-2008

Gartner Hype Cycles are good for at least three things: identifying technologies that are still under the radar, taking a look back at stuff that was hyped up in the past but didn't go anywhere, and explaining to your parents what it is that you do as an emerging media strategist.

Besides, they illustrate this wonderful quote from David Brooks's "Lord of the Meme" column in NYTimes: "In order to cement your status in the cultural elite, you want to be already sick of everything no one else has even heard of."

These graphs also provide good fodder for thinking about how media consumption would change if any of the pre-hype technologies reached mass adoption.

After catching the 2008 graph on Techcrunch a few days ago, I hit up Google image search for earlier versions. (You can also buy Gartner's original reports, but at close to $2,000 apiece they are beyond this blog's budget). Below is what I've found. You will see that some of the technologies don't make it into the later versions of the graph; I think it's because these are Garther's charts for different tech sectors. Click on images to zoom in.

If you have graphs for the missing years, please comment or drop me a line.



1995


2000



2003



2004




2005


2006



2007


2008


Sources: Dave Chaffey, this blog, Techcrunch, SAPDesignGuild, Gartner, Guardian

Price and Penetration of Consumer Electronics

Wired: Price and market penetration of consumer electronics over the past 50 years. Infographic: Arno Ghelfi.  Sources: Consumer Electronics Association, US Bureau of Labor Statistics. CD player data not available for 2006 and 2007.

Similar: 
TV Penetration in 1940
NYTimes Graph: Technology Adoption Rates

Heat Map of Search Results Clicks

A heat map of Google clicks and attention distribution on a Google search results page from a 2006 eyetracking study. Useful for making PowerPoints more dramatic, but beware of the methodological limitations.

Facebook, Twitter Buzz Visualized

Facebook's Lexicon graphs occurrences of every queried term (up to five at a time, above: "cucumber", "tomato") across profile, group and event Walls, illustrating the ebb and flow of user buzz. What's up with that cucumber buzz spike?
-- Facebook blog

People on twitter talk more about tomatoes than cucumbers as well (see twittermeter, also see these other cool viz tools):

Make Games with MS Excel

I wrote about games build in and for MS Excel earlier, and now Gamasutra runs a very detailed feature showing some of the hidden powers of the office application:

"It's time to learn a new 3D game engine name: Microsoft Excel.

It is understood that Excel is an all-round office tool, but probably it is unknown that it has a bunch of features that makes Excel a high-class 3D graphics engine.

In this article I will demonstrate Excel's arithmetical facilities, the embedded rendering subsystems (there are two of them!) and the revolutionary approach which might just cause a paradigm shift. I hope you will discover that Excel effectively and efficiently incorporates practicality, tons of features, the multi-platform portability and the high performance with the unique and futuristic 3D engine features."

Check out Excel Music Synthesizer build on MS Excel 2007.



Also:
PowerPoint Karaoke

Graph: Life of a Blog Post

What happens to your post after you hit the "Publish" button, illustrated by Wired.

Graph: Technology Adoption Rates

NY Times published an excellent graph showing adoption rates for different technologies by three income tiers of the US population. Links: the article, the graph.