About this Blogsphere:

This blogsphere attempts to capture, catalog and share resources relating to visual perception of information. It is about a world mostly dealing with Physical (Touch, Taste, See/Sight, Smell and Hear) and sometimes Metaphysical (and that is none-of-the-above category). Physical, for instance, touch (e.g., feel, felt, found), look and visualization, is here with an attempt to combine verbal, vocal and visual--to synchronously see, hear, share and do much more. Interestingly, in order to visualize one does not need special skills, competencies, etc. It is all about common sense, especially with human visualizations. In short, "information is in the eye of the beholder." Continue reading much more all-ado-about this Blogosphere

Akbani is a Cutchi Memon family name.

December 14, 2010

Visualizing Facebook Friendships Across the Globe According to Paul Butler

Facebook intern Paul Butler created a visualization of Facebook connections around the globe,

By Ben Parr, Mashable, CNN
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
* A Facebook intern created a visualization of Facebook connections around the globe
* Using a sample of 10 million friend pairs, he correlated them with their current cities
* The U.S. has the highest concentration of Facebook friendships while Africa has the lowest
Continue reading Facebook relationships visualized

Here is what Butler had to say @ newsday.com:
"After a few minutes of rendering, the new plot appeared, and I was a bit taken aback by what I saw. The blob had turned into a surprisingly detailed map of the world. Not only were continents visible, certain international borders were apparent as well. What really struck me, though, was knowing that the lines didn't represent coasts or rivers or political borders, but real human relationships. Each line might represent a friendship made while travelling, a family member abroad, or an old college friend pulled away by the various forces of life."

Facebook staffer Paul Butler has created this beautiful map of the millions (billions?) of friendships stored in the social network, using something that looks like edge bundles to create the beautiful map. Says, Randall Hand @ | VizWorld.com

On the same shelf:
  • Tim Berners-Lee says Facebook 'threatens' web future
  • Facebook Q&A Update: Sorry, we're not ready for you just yet
  • Google Alerts' mybookface! And, the true colors of Internet Explorer and Firefox Web Browsers in dealing with Web forgery
  • Facebook penetration: a whopping 40% in Canada - with UK a close second
  • April 25, 2010

    I want to download your mind…

    Posted on February 19, 2010 by Eva Schiffer @ Net-Map Toolbox:

    Descartes "Mind and Body" source Wikipedia Commons

    When doing qualitative research there are so many nuances in the answers, that it often feels like: If you weren’t there, you won’t be able to really get it. Unless you can download the interviewer’s mind. Which – so far – is not possible. When I started developing and using Net-Map this didn’t matter much, because projects where small and basically I would be the person doing both, the interviewing and the analysis. Or I’d teach another research who would do another small project, doing both, the interviewing and the interpretation. But with this model you can only grow so far and I know we should be able to do better than this, to work in a bigger team of researchers, facilitators, interpreters and benefit from each others’ experience and insight, without plugging a USB cord into each others’ ears. continue reading

    March 25, 2010

    text-free user interfaces - Medhi interface




    Indrani Medhi brings the power of computing to illiterate, first-time users in India.

    “It really came as a very pleasant surprise,” says Medhi, an associate researcher in the Technology for Emerging Markets group at Microsoft Research India whose work in text-free user interfaces is being featured by MoMA. “From the beginning, we did not think of this as an art project. We just thought of it as solving a particular problem.

    March 14, 2010

    SuperPower: Visualising the Internet's The top 100 sites

    NB. Info courtesy: Dr. John Jaeger, Dallas Baptist University
    Image courtesy: Paul Adams, VizWorld.com

    BBC News - The top 100 sites on the internet
    Explore this interactive graphic to find out which are the biggest sites on the internet, as measured by the Nielsen company. This feature is part of SuperPower, a season of programmes exploring the power of the internet.

    The data used to generate the interactive treemap visualisation was collected by the Nielsen company and covers the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Brazil, US and Australia. The figures represent unique users for the month of January 2010.

    The categories – such as retail, social networks, search/portal – were defined by the BBC. Because some websites have more than one use, they could fall within more than one category (e.g. Yahoo). However, the treemap only classifies them once.

    The maps were produced using the Prefuse Flare software, developed by the University of California Berkeley.