Search Patterns
Information Architect Peter Morville keeps his search pattern screenshot collection on Flickr.
Weakened in Paradise
I always believed my best bet for employment was the service sector, but it hasn’t worked out the way I expected. I’ll never give up intelligence-gathering, covert surveillance, and stalking as hobbies, of course, but ever since Big Government became more deeply involved in those fields I’m finding it much more difficult to make a living pursuing the observational arts.
IRS Spam Is Clever, Dangerous
I just had a pretty scary piece of spam show up in my inbox. It appears to be from the IRS, implicates my employer, and comes immediately on the heels of the US tax season. All in all, very well socially-engineered.
Long story short, it’s spam, but you need to be careful. There’s more where it came from.
More details here.
This Week’s Mantra
Make mistakes faster.
The Associated Press vs. Everybody Else
Additionally, the AP made clear to all and sundry it would charge fees every time its copyrighted material is excerpted, alluded to, or dreamed about.
Bloggers around the world expressed their outrage about the AP’s action by using strong words, street-smart wisdom, and merciless quoting.
111 Nations Approve clusterflock Treaty
Dublin, Ireland — A controversial agreement limiting the deployment of clusterflock was reached Friday.
The talks were boycotted by the governments of Russia, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and the United States.
“We can’t take a chance that an innocent person could stumble upon an unopened post or link,” said Norwegian representative Hans Lars-Erik Olof.
An unnamed clusterflock bomblet producer did not reply to emails pertaining to the treaty.
opportunity knocking
Clusterfockers,
As some of you know, I’m splitting this fine country without even waiting to see who our candidates are. As some of you also know, I work at this place Millennium Promise that does sustainable development work in Africa. With my leaving, my job as the web dude is becoming vacant. So if you live in the NYC area and think I have a cool job, now it could be yours. Here’s the job description:
http://www.millenniumpromise.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_careers
Also, I mentioned this before, but a reminder that there’s 54 days left in the Design 21/Millennium Promise competition:
http://www.design21sdn.com/competitions/13
Now’s your chance to apply your design skills for the better good.
choice architecture
The way options are presented shapes our understanding / acceptance of them. Everything from where a candidate is listed on a ballot to how a doctor defines the odds of a particular surgery changes how we react to the information that is presented to us. In the world of internet development these choices are made and shaped by information architecture; I guess these choices are now being referred to in the real world as choice architecture.
Here’s a fun one.
One memorable example of the power of choice architecture comes from the men’s rooms at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam. There the authorities have etched the image of a black housefly into each urinal. It seems that men usually do not pay much attention to where they aim, which can create a bit of a mess, but if they see a target, their attention and accuracy improve. Spillage at the airport decreased by 80%!
infographics
Charles Joseph Minard may get all the accolades for his graphic of Napolean’s march to Moscow, but for me, the above chart is the most beautiful ever created.
Brijit, using people, rather than algorithms, to filter information overload
A handful of startups are harnessing humans to process the daily onslaught of information.
Every day, Brijit publishes around 125 concise summaries of newspaper and magazine articles, as well as audio and video programs, rating each on a scale of 0 (”actively avoid”) to 3 (”a must read”) so readers can decide whether it’s worth their time to click through. “What we’ve created with Brijit is your well-read friend,” says Brosowsky, whose eight employees sift through more than 100 sources, from AARP the Magazine to XXL.
Google is getting into the game:
In December, Google announced that it was developing knol, a tool that will allow experts to write authoritative introductions — knols — about a vast range of subjects. “A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read,” wrote Udi Manber, a vice president of engineering at Google. In other words, after spending untold millions refining its proprietary algorithms, the titans of the Web are starting to realize there’s no substitute for the human touch.
a singles map of the united states
US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud
The above tag cloud shows the popularity, frequency, and trends in the usages of words within speeches, official documents, declarations, and letters written by the Presidents of the US between 1776 - 2007 AD.
“Area codes”
* “Ludacris heavily favors the East Coast to the West, save for Seattle, San Francisco, Sacramento, and Las Vegas.”
* “Ludacris travels frequently along the Boswash corridor.”
* “There is a ‘ho belt‘ phenomenon nearly synonymous with the ‘Bible Belt’.”
* “Ludacris has hoes in the entire state of Maryland.”
* “Ludacris has a disproportionate ho-zone in rural Nebraska. He might favor white women as much as he does black women, or perhaps, girls who farm.”
* “Ludacris’s ideal ‘ho-highway’ would be I-95.”
* “Ludacris has hoes in the Midway and Wake Islands. Only scientists are allowed to inhabit the Midway Islands, and only military personnel may inhabit the Wake Islands. Draw your own conclusion.”
(That last one sounds like a parody of an entry on Chuck Norris Facts)
(Via Strange Maps, by way of Matthew Yglesias)
Song Chart Meme
Designing an End to Poverty
I haven’t posted anyting since I started my new job, but finally I found something relevant to post on clusterflock, this interview with Jeffrey Sachs in Design 21. From a web design point of view, I’ve been tasked with refreshing the www.millenniumpromise.org site. Any clusterflocky feedback?
How Do You Read clusterflock?
I do a quick scroll down the new posts. Then read backwards down the recent comments.
Miley Cyrus Makes Offer To Buy Microsoft
Redmond, WA — Fifteen-year-old pop singer and actress Miley Cyrus rocked the business world Friday by announcing her intent to purchase the assets of software giant Microsoft Corporation for an disclosed sum. Internationally famous as the genetic source of her cloned body double Hannah Montana, Ms. Cyrus made the offer at the climax of a really totally kickin’ private concert staged for Microsoft’s board of directors.
“We’ve got a lot on our plate right now,” said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, “what with making our own offer for Yahoo! and competition with Google and everything, but that talented little Miley is so damned cute we may not be able to resist.”
StupidFilter
Apparently, an actual project.
From the FAQ:
Isn’t filtering stupidity elitist?
Yes. Yes, it is. That’s sort of the whole point.
(via)
Dear AOL,
What do you suck so bad?
You are the offspring of People Magazine’s forbidden love affair with a big-ass Hewlett-Packard server. You are a shopping mall built into a train station. You are like having to surf TV channels before making a phone call.
The World Resized Proportionally According to Books Published
There’s other renderings according to other stats here.
Flock without the Cluster?
flock.com is a good idea, in theory, the implementation sucks. They mistook clustering for cluttering. Someone needs to build such a thing to cluster all the various social networking sites into a true “Flock”.
Heat Map of Haringey, London, UK
Lots of energy is used to heat our homes and businesses, and some of that energy goes to waste. How much is wasted? And by whom? Three simple steps to find out.
1. Fly a plane over city that uses thermal imaging to record heat escaping from the residents homes below.
2. Overlay this info over map of the area and data on properties.
3. Put this map on the web hoping to shame residents to lower the thermostat and/or increase the level of insulation in their home.
From the Times,
Haringey Council, in London, has become the first authority in England to place house-by-house thermal maps on the web, after the example of Aberdeen in Scotland.
Making the information available to the public is intended to raise awareness of how much energy is being used needlessly, putting up bills and contributing to global warming.
It is hoped that homeowners with high wastage levels will be shamed into improving the property’s insulation.
Can public knowledge of our wasteful/damaging habits change us individually and as a society? SUV’s, styrofoam cups, coal fired power plants? Discuss.
Sea Dragon and Photosynth
Go and see
Harper’s E-Archive Interview
For designers and all those who love to study the visual histories of periodicals, reading text without seeing the page is like reading a screenplay without seeing the movie. Harper’s Magazine, on the other hand, has gone all the way. It has created what associate editor Paul Ford calls “a massive, interlinked, searchable document that provides quick access” to 157 continuous years of Harper’s—with illustrations and all. Working alone, without any consulting team and without fuss, Ford has been a man with a plan, a scanner and a lot of patience.
Information Expert Edward Tufte
After an encounter with Tufte’s ideas, people can never again look at a chart, a map, a scientific table or a PowerPoint presentation quite the same way. In his romps through statistics, art, history, science, policy and anything else that grabs his interest, Tufte tackles a fundamental problem: how to accurately render complex, interrelated information on a two-dimensional paper surface or computer screen—how to, as he puts it, “escape flatland.’’ Tufte explains how to do it well and demonstrates the many, many ways it’s done badly.