EXP: realtime Archives

Sarkissian Mason Redesign

by Craig Kanarick on February 23, 2010 | No Comments

New York agency Sarkissian Mason just relaunched their website with a combination

worship/slam of data gathering and analysis.

The firm wired up their office with a bunch of sensors, tied them together using Arduino, and are publishing the real-time results of their data gathering on their homepage, providing a peek at various metrics about life at the firm. It would seem that by doing so, they are implying that the gathering and analysis of data is relevant to creativity. Not so, however. If you watch their "behind the scenes" video, they clearly state that gathering numbers doesn't lead to better ideas. I strongly disagree. While it isn't enough to just gather data and look at it in order to come up with better ideas, data gathering and visualization can certainly give people the insights needed to make better decisions as well as provide inspiration for great ideas.

Either way, the site totally works.

Four Ways of Looking at Twitter via HBR

by Craig Kanarick on February 22, 2010 | No Comments

More than just transforming data into practical information, Jeff Clark has made data visualization "cool" with his twitter-based interactive infographics. Highlighted in a recent Harvard Business Review online article, Clark is a computer programmer whose brilliance is manifested through his discerning research and ability to translate the results graphically.

Featured in the article are four of Clark's Twitter infographics--TwitterVenn, Twitter Spectrum, TwitterArcs and StreamGraph (shown below).

While the graphs are both beautiful and accurate, one of the major concerns is using java as this language is particularly slow.

Regardless, Clark is paving the way for how we use and view information, especially relating to business and social activity. Read more about his data visualizations and see more stunning examples from his website.

Imogen Heap and Her Interactive Dress

by Craig Kanarick on February 4, 2010 | No Comments

Last weekend, at the Grammy's, Imogen Heap wore was was called a "Twitdress", a dress with an attached monitor that supposedly displayed tweets in real-time. The screen was so small and hidden during the broadcast that it was difficult, if not impossible, to tell if it was working but it sure looked interesting. While this wasn't the best example of how to infuse an outfit with technology, given the size of the viewing audience, might be the most exposed example of interactive fashion in the world. The parasol-as-wifi-antenna was a particularly inspired touch.

She wore the dress as she accepted the (appropriate) award for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical. Not only does she have 1.3 million followers, she's embraced the digital age by inviting her fans and followers to provide feedback, remixes and lyrics ideas.

Bigert&Bergström: Tomorrow's Weather

by Craig Kanarick on December 15, 2009 | No Comments

Stemming from a childhood fascination of a weather ball on the top of a bank building in Minneapolis, I am intrigued by Tomorrow's Weather, a double helix sculpture in Denmark comprised of over 60 molecular globes.

What's interesting about this is that traditional weather balls--also known as weather beacons--are usually located on top of buildings or attached to towers. Tomorrow's Weather uses current technology to forecast upcoming elements just like a weather ball, while remaining affixed to the side of the building.

Weather beacons are found in cities from Sydney to Cincinnati, so have a look around to see if your city is included. Often a little poem is attached to the weather codes to make its information easy to memorize. I will never forget that "when the weather ball is red, warmer weather is ahead..."

For real weather fanatics, check out the ambient weather beacon, a home device that also forecasts the upcoming weather.

Reactive and Interactive Digital Billboards

by Craig Kanarick on December 9, 2009 | No Comments

As we are knee deep in decade-review media chatter about the death of the TV ad, I decided to think about other forms of advertising pronounced dead in the past, billboards.

One of the oldest forms of advertising, the billboard first gained traction in the late 1800s. The popularity of the Model T in 1908 drove billboards to become common as roadside advertising and in 1925, the Burma-Shave billboards start populating US highways, cementing outdoor as an important channel for consumer messages.

Over the years, the billboards were the playground of advertising creatives and continue to push the limits of the format. In the 1920's, billboards became reactive and changed their content in realtime with giant thermometers, changing their display with the ambient temperature. What follows is a brief natural history of the reactive and interactive billboard in recent times.

October 2003

Coke launches a 99-foot wide interactive billboard in Picadilly Circus recognizing and responding both to the weather and people waving to it from below (above left).

May 2004

Stellar interactive firm R/GA creates a billboard for Yahoo!'s automotive web site allowing pedestrians to play a video game on a 23-story billboard via mobile phones (above right).

July 2004

Ogilvy launches an SMS-reactive billboard for the Ford Fiesta in Belgium, the first of its kind in Europe (above left).

February 2005

Amex Belgium launches a billboard in which users can upload a photo to a website that in turn displays it on the billboard where a live webcam photographs the billboard and emails it back to the user (above right).

May 2005
Nike ID uses a 23-story Times Square billboard for users to design shoes via mobile phones and see results in real time. The one-minute design session also sends emails and discounts to the designer, er, customer (at right).

February 2006

Disney Interactive has an 57-story tall reactive billboard featuring imagery of the Himalayas. The billboard blinks the eyes of a yeti upon receiving SMS sent to it.

January 2007

Mini Cooper USA launches in Chicago, Miami, New York and San Francisco. After the Mini drivers answer some basic information about themselves, Mini USA sends them a special key fob identifiying them to the billboards they pass by, delivering a personal message based on the information provided.

June 2007
One of my absolute favorites is the BBC America billboards shown above. They were placed in New York where viewers sent SMS messages to answer polls and updated the billboard in real-time.

July 2007
Adobe uses a billboard that reacts to the motion of the person standing in front of it. The system, which uses a simple webcam with complicated processing code behind it is a joy to look at and fun to interact with.

August 2007
Ecko launches a billboard that allows users to digitally spraypaint using a Blackberry.

Feb 2008

Australian billboard sneezes on people.

October 2008
A billboard in New Zealand by ddb tests earphone levels from the National Foundation for the Deaf.

January 2009

Sharpie creates gorgeous interactive billboards.

Feb 2009

Cadbury Splat the Egg interactive bus shelter ad allows waiting passengers to pass the time by playing a video game.

March 2009

In a Rotterdam bus stop, health club chain Fitness First converts the bench into a digital scale with the readout on the shelter wall (at right).

July 2009
Caldwell Banker creates a live 150-foot billboard that responds to text messages with Zip codes by displaying the highest, median and lowest price properties in that zip code within seconds.

July 2009

In Korea Nikon does what looks like a truly amazing job with an interactive billboard that simulates paparazzi to launch their D700 camera (at right).

Sept 2009

I hate to end with a billboard fail, but who can resist laughing at the twitter-enabled billboard below...Happy New Year!

Continue reading Reactive and Interactive Digital Billboards.

Weekend Visualizations To Be Thankful For

by Craig Kanarick on November 30, 2009 | No Comments

As it was the most digital, this past holiday weekend most likely generated more data about our habits than any other in history. Two great new online visualizations portray this with beautiful and clear stories about the typical Thanksgiving activities--shopping and cooking.

I first saw eBay's Black Friday map on TechCrunch and was immediately impressed with how hypnotic and psychedelic it was. The pulsating graphics illustrate interesting patterns of our eBay shopping habits on Black Friday, the supposedly biggest shopping day of the year.

The New York Times published What's Cooking on Thanksgiving, a typically clean, clear and wonderfully produced map of allrecipes.com search terms, showing overt regional patterns in our holiday food preferences, or at least our desire to research recipes about those foods.

Realtime: This site is being upgraded

by Craig Kanarick on November 29, 2009 | No Comments

If you are here and notice that it looks different than the last time you were here, that is because I upgraded the blogging software. Unfortunately, that downgraded the visuals for a while until I figure this out. My apologies.

-- cmk

Live Ships Map

by Craig Kanarick on November 9, 2009 | No Comments

MarineTraffic.com is a new website based on Google Maps and some open data that allows people to monitor real time ship traffic around the world. Because of some data constraints, the information is mostly about ships on the European and North American coastlines, but a full range of ships are in the system.

The project is hosted by the Department of Project and Systems Design Engineering at the University of the Aegean in Greece. Rolling over a ship icon reveals information such as the heading and history of the vehicle.

The site refreshes itself automatically every minute or so (depending on what part of the world you are monitoring), making the entire experience fun to just use as a screensaver.

The Press Agrees

by Craig Kanarick on November 2, 2009 | No Comments

Last week two major press outlets covered two of the topics found here on EXP, which is always a good thing. First, Adweek talked about the rise of real-time marketing.

CNN has also jumped on the bandwagon with a nice article about data visualization.

Digital Painting "The Landing" by SWEATSHOPPE

by Craig Kanarick on October 22, 2009 | No Comments

SWEATSHOPPE, comprised of New York artists Bruno Levy and Blake Shaw have released The Landing, an amazing video of their project that blends traditional wheatpasting x graffiti x digital video projection. By attaching green LEDs to wheatpasting roller brushes and tracking their motion in software, they are able to project a digital video reacting to physical actions.

This video is inspiring as an example of a digital physical integration that has a wide range of uses and I look forward to when they release software that could make digital painting kits accessible to a wide range of individuals and organizations.

FIFA Earth

by Craig Kanarick on October 21, 2009 | No Comments

EA Sports launched Fifa Earth, an incredible three-part real-time interactive data visualization based on their FIFA 10 soccer game. By allowing the game to upload its information to a global server, the application then tracks the number of people playing, wins, losses, draws and other information. The site also collects all of the tweets about FIFA (by searching for tags such as #fifa, #fussball, #soccer and the like) and displays them on a sexy image of the Earth-as-a-soccer-ball.

When I visited the site today, there were over 40 million games played on the PlayStation ahd XBox networks alone all feeding data to the system. By the end of the year they expect over 2 billion!

Thanks, as always, infosthetics.

(I apologize for being so datavis heavy lately, I'll get back to the other subjects soon, I promise).

United States Gross National Happiness on Facebook

by Craig Kanarick on October 6, 2009 | No Comments

Facebook recently released their US Gross National Happiness data visualization which looks at all of the status updates posted and tries to evaluate, using keywords, whether the author had a positive or negative attitude. It is certainly not accurate, but it sure is fun to play with.

Two Great New Self-Tracking Tools

by Craig Kanarick on October 6, 2009 | No Comments

Today is a good day for people wishing to track the caloric intake and usage with the release of two new tools. The first is DailyBurn's FoodScanner which is an iPhone app allowing users of the $.99 program to scan UPC barcodes with their device and automagically look up nutritional information from a database of over 200,000 food items.

Fitbit is a new standalone clip-on passive geotracking device that records physical activity 24 hours a day and computes calories burned and amount of time sleeping based on the wearer's movement. While not great for running or biking or other fast-moving exercise, once the data is uploaded, the user can modify it easily.

Monitoring the Twitterverse

by Craig Kanarick on August 24, 2009 | No Comments

According to a recent Mashable article, almost 70% of adults in the US don't know enough about Twitter to "have an opinion" about it. Even so, its popularity continues to grow and so do tools to measure it, complete with data visualizations to tell stories about these measurements. In this post, I'll cover a few of the ones I've been monitoring lately.

Twitalyzer measures traffic based on usernames (i.e. @kanarick) and defines derived values such as brand Strength, Signal, Favor, Passion and Clout based on that traffic. They also use globally aggregated data to create interesting lists such as the 100 most influential Twitterers. (Is 'Twitterer' a word?)

Open Brands, a service of Earthsite Labs, is a user-created directory of over 300 brands, which they call "Brand Channels," using the Twitalyzer measurements on both usernames and hashtags for slightly different results.

Along with content, a user's network is another slice of the Twitter ecosystem. TwitterFriends is a good stab at creating visualizations and data analysis of a network's shape and size. Here you can see some of the results of analyzing social media blogger, Dave Armano's network.

TweetEffect charts how a network changes in size between tweets, suggesting that you might find a pattern between what you tweet and how many people start or stop following you. I'm not convinced that any singular tweet really changes the size of your network, unless you specifically ask people to pass something on.

Blending a part of the real-time twitter stream with an artistic lens can create both beautiful and informative experiences that evolve over time. One of the best examples of this is well-known Twistori, an elegant unfolding experience of animated tweets that contain the words love, hate, think, believe, feel or wish. It makes a great screensaver and is never dull.

The SEC's New Media Policy is Forward-Thinking and Madness (UPDATED)

by Craig Kanarick on August 20, 2009 | No Comments

The Southeastern Conference of college sports earlier this month sent an updated media policy to the 12 member schools. The policy places new stringent limits on how much audio, video and "real-time" blogging they can do at events such as games, practices and new conferences. While the rules are stringent, they aren't that unexpected. What is really crazy, however, is that the same restrictions are placed on fans in the stands. That means, in theory, that fans are prohibited from updating Twitter, Facebook or their blogs from a game. It means no taking photos with phones and sending them to the internet for public viewing. In theory, it means no calling a friend during a game and telling them the score!

The SEC is a very wealthy organization. ESPN and CBS pay over $3 billion to them for the exclusive right to broadcast games over the next 15 years. They also own their own digital broadcast network and a robust SECSports.com web presence.

How, you might ask, are they going to enforce a rule like this in a stadium full of 90,000 fans? I'm not really sure, but perhaps they will take the tack that the music industry took and prosecute a few violators and try to fine them ridiculously large sums of money in order to make examples of them and scare the other fans.

Look, I'm all for protecting the intellectual property rights of exclusive content, and I know that fan-based videos from cellphones are not a threat to CBS or ESPN and won't be for a few years. In some ways, the policy is very forward-thinking as it anticipates a day when fans have very high-quality broadcast capabilities in their mobile devices. Even so, I hope that broadcast networks would augment their video feed with enough commentary, graphics, data and other content that a fan in the stands will still not be a threat to the currently established set of media companies. If they can't evolve, I say let them die.

Does the SEC really want to prevent fans from seeing great fan-taken shots from a game? Wouldn't the posting of images from a game in real time on a site like facebook get people to turn on their TV and watch a game? Seems like they are going after the wrong things with this policy.

Thanks to The St. Petersberg Times for writing a great article about this subject.

UPDATE: Seems the SEC was influenced by the real-time response to the article mentioned above. The day after the article was published, the SEC revised their policy to allow fans to send pictures and updates as long as they aren't for commercial purposes but still makes videos against the rules.

My Persona

by Craig Kanarick on August 19, 2009 | No Comments

Personas, part of the Metropath(ologies) installation at the MIT Museum, is created by Aaron Zinman (with help from Alex Dragulescu, Yannick Assogba and Judith Donath) of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. It is a beautiful visualization of search results, but the story is that it presents a infographic as "how the internet sees you."

After typing in your name, the system searches the web and processes the words around the results, presenting them as a view of your personality. With terms like education, politics, illegal and others, as you quickly watch the search results on a name go by, you can't help but think the system knows what it is doing. But this really isn't an accurate assessment.

There are many people with the same name. If you don't have a unique name, how would the system know it is you? The results, even though they are based on data, are missing critical information necessary to be factually correct. This makes this art piece work for me -- as a modern digital fortune teller x personality test x social commentary experiment x tribute to my former advisor, the late great Muriel Cooper, designer of the Media Lab's identity system pictured below.

Personas has me coming back day after day.

Technology on the farm

by Craig Kanarick on August 10, 2009 | No Comments

Demonstrating the broad reach of real-time communications tools, CNN recently published an article about how people like 39-year old Nebraska wheat farmer Steve Tucker uses twitter over ten times a day during work. This usage isn't unique -- every Tuesday from 6-8pm Eastern, farmers meet on twitter and post with the hashtag #agchat, utilizing the platform as a large public chatroom. Started by agriculture advocacy writer and speaker Michele Payn-Knoper, these chats have dedicated subjects each week and can draw thousands of participants.

Discussions aren't the only use of real-time digital technologies being embraced by the farm. PureSense, an irrigation software company, recently released an iPhone version of their main product, allowing farmers to remotely monitor the real-time water content of various locations of their land. According to most reports, the system not only saves farmers water, they also have higher yields, clearly a sustainable benefit.

Another example comes from Danish firm Smarterfarming who just released its CowDetect RFID system for tracking cows' locations, consumption and other activities. By looking at visualizations of the data, cow owners can discover information about a cow's health and optimie milking schedules. They claim that a $511 per cow investment (for a farm with 200 cows) will yield $500 per cow per year in savings. The system also issues daily warnings about cows it thinks might be at a health risk or crisis, allowing early intervention on potentially damaging conditions.

Visualizing Our Goverment's IT Investments (UPDATED)

by Craig Kanarick on August 6, 2009 | No Comments

The US Government's march towards public transparency continues with the recent launch of the IT Dashboard, a visualization of Federal "information technology investments" and part of the massive USASpending.gov effort.

The still-in-beta site displays information on over 7000 investments with detailed data for over 10% of them, mostly the ones categorized as "major" investments. Each investment is ranked by its manager on a five-point scale ranging from low-risk to high-risk, based on a large number of factors. With almost 7% of the investments at high-risk, a debate will certainly ensue around to the government's ability to manage particular types of IT projects and investments, especially when each department is considered individually. For example, the Department of Veteran's Affairs seems particularly troubled with a whopping 82% of its $2.6 billion in investments considered high-risk -- especially when compared to the $1.6 billion investments by Department of Energy, 96% of which have little or no risk.

The data is updated frequently and while the graphics are slightly misleading (they are in 3-D) and have a garish color palette, they are easy to read and easy to process.

For a spot-on negative and extensive critique of the site, read this post by Stephen Fry.

The NFL: Don't Tweet

by Craig Kanarick on August 4, 2009 | No Comments

In what surely will be reversed in years to come, the NFL has recently told players that they are not allowed to text or tweet from team meetings or coaching sessions. Not every team has a specific ban, but players were told at training camps this week to keep precious information close to the vest.

For more coverage, read the NY Times article The NFL Has Identified the Enemy and It Is Twitter.

Steven Johnson on The Future of News

by Craig Kanarick on August 3, 2009 | No Comments

In March of 2009 Steven B. Johnson gave a great speech at SXSW in Austin called Old Growth Media and the Future of News which does a great job explaining that news, just like every other form of information, is happening in real-time more frequently. The entire thing is worth reading, but here is a great pullquote:

"...there is going to be more content, not less; more information, more analysis, more precision, a wider range of niches covered..."

While this speech focuses on the future of news media, the same arguments could be made for all media.

Everything that can be tracked, will be?

by Craig Kanarick on July 29, 2009 | No Comments

PSFK does a great job of investigating some of our motivations for real-time tracking and the growth of the phenomenon in a recent post entitled "Our Obsession with Tracking." In the article, they refer to a recent USA Today article that covers similar ground and even calls America "a nation of track-a-holics":

"Americans love knowing where their things are," says Chris McGlothlin, chief information officer at Domino's. Folks constantly tell Domino's how much they hate not knowing when -- or if -- their pizza will arrive. The Pizza Tracker, used by 75% of Domino's online customers, is an attempt to solve that problem. While current technology also could track the whereabouts of drivers, Domino's won't track that for security reasons.

The article also asserts that our need to track things gives us a sense of control over the world, something which many of us currently feel we need more of. FedEx.com gets over 6 million package tracking requests every day!

Whatever the cause, it is clear that real-time tracking is a key customer support function and business tool for many large companies and brands and will only grow as tracking hardware and software becomes more sophisticated and less expensive.

Best Buy Gets It

by Craig Kanarick on July 20, 2009 | No Comments

Best Buy is using real-time communications and open innovation as a model for recruiting a new Senior Manager of Emerging Media.

When the job posting, first made public by a recruiter on Twitter, specified over 250 Twitter followers as a job requirement, lots of online chatter ensued. In response, Best Buy's CMO Barry Judge decided to create an online contest for the best job description using their robust Idea X platform. The contest just ended and the winning job description hasn't been officially posted, but you can read the submissions as well as the motivations for the project on Barry's blog.

Airlines and Twitter

by Craig Kanarick on July 20, 2009 | No Comments

A recent Ad Age article, How Twitter can Help or Hurt an Airline, accurately described why Southwest Airlines is a leader in their use of real-time communications to express their brand attributes. For example, when a recent flight encountered a large hole in the fuselage and was forced to land, customers weren't the only people tweeting about it -- the airline also started posting updates on their official twitter feed, including information about how every plane was to be inspected that night and that customers on the flight were given full refunds. As a result, Southwest was able to provide their information to the world well before news outlets were able to report on the incident.

Virgin Atlantic has monitored tweets in real-time by passengers on flights and alerted flight crews within minutes of customer issues, allowing them to respond quickly. See my earlier post on PF Changs for another great example of this kind of real-time/real-world twitter usage.

Tour de France 2009

by Craig Kanarick on July 19, 2009 | No Comments

Long cycling events, such as the 3-week Tour de France 2009 which ran from July 4-26, with large international audiences are fertile ground for innovative approaches to marketing and technology. I've already written about the Nike Chalkbot and there are other exciting examples cropping up frequently.

As with all sports, cycling is increasing its use of data -- biometric rider data, weather conditions, equipment monitoring are just three examples. Teams regularly record detailed information about individual atheletes during races and practices and analyze the information to improve performance. Peaksware, the makers of TraningPeaks, a training log and food diary software suite, is sharing some of the information and analysis associated with data from Team Saxo Bank, Team Columbia HTC and others, along with power meter race data from SRM on their blog every day.

For more, read Data Mining le Tour, from frogdesign.

Tom's One for One Movement

by Craig Kanarick on July 15, 2009 | No Comments

Tom's Shoes, a 3-year old company started by serial entrepreneur Blake Mycoskie, is based on a simple, yet extremely sustainable idea: for every pair of shoes purchased, Tom's donates a pair to a child in need.

To date, the company has given over 140,000 pairs of shoes away and plans to give away a whopping 300,000 this year alone. Their goals include protecting the feet of children around the world, especially in places where walking is the primary mode of transportation, but also eradicating the deforming foot disease podoconiosis in Ethiopia.

Where did the idea come from? In 2003, he and his sister were contestants on "The Amazing Race" and a few years later, they revisited some of the places from the show. When they visited Argentina and saw aid workers distributing shoes that didn't fit the recipients, he decided to do something about it. In addition to producing inexpensive and fashionable espadrilles, they have created a strong network of supporters on college campuses, giving top members free trips to drop off shoes. The site is also best-in-class with great use of video and real-time chat-driven customer support.

PF Changs x Twitter = Customer Satisfaction

by Craig Kanarick on July 15, 2009 | No Comments

Here is a simple story of a company using Twitter to bolster its brand. Watch Kelly Morehead explain how a customer's tweet ended up getting her some amazing customer service just a few minutes later.

Thanks, Andy Sernovitz.

Personal Data Visualizations

by Craig Kanarick on July 15, 2009 | No Comments

One of the more interesting uses of data tracking and analysis is the ability to track personal behavior, visualize the results and explore personal trends over time. Some designers have even taken to publishing "annual reports" about their own actions during a year.

Designers

Nicholas Felton and Ryan Case started website Daytum to allow users to track and visualize their personal actions. The personal dashboard system is a free service with numerous clean options for displaying information. For a $4/month fee, additional options, including privacy controls, are available.

When my wife and I had our first child, we made great use of TrixieTracker, a subscription-based service to allow new parents to track the behaviors of their child in order to recognize patterns and, hopefully, make the whole process of early parenthood easier. One of the difficulties for data tracking services, we discovered, is the data entry process.

Even with things like Nike Plus and GPS devices, few people are wearing enough biometric or sensing hardware to automate the data collection process. As a result, the consumer is burdened with the task of entering what could be a huge amount of information. Many times, the activity to be recorded is happening far away from a computer connected to the internet, increasing the difficulties.

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Today, Nathan Yau, editor of data visualization blog FlowingData, released your.flowingdata 2.0 (YFD) in an attempt to provide a personal tracking service with a reduced hassle of entering data. YFD allows people to use Twitter to easily record their actions and uses tools on the website for visualization. For people who use Twitter regularly, they often broadcast their activities frequently so the addition of a few tags in each post won't be too much more work for them. The service is currently free and is part of Yau's graduate school research.

I haven't been able to regularly use any of these since I stopped using Trixie Tracker, but now that I've started inline skating again, I'm tempted, but first I want to research exercise-specific tracking opportunities. As soon as I do, I'll write about it here.

Twitter Music Charts

by Craig Kanarick on July 13, 2009 | No Comments

Over the past few days, I've been paying attention to music charts based on Twitter traffic. Each of the versions in this rapidly growing new field use different mechanisms to determine what is popular at the moment.

The Twitter Music Chart developed by The Hype Machine isn't strictly real-time, as it aggregates mentions of songs over the past three days. What's interesting about the scoring mechanism is that each tweet is ranked based on how many people are following the author, so not all mentions are equal. While this sounds like a good idea, it can lead to results that are easily skewed by popular users. Case-in-point: TechCrunch author Erick Schonfeld used his account with almost one million followers to put Rick Astley at the top of the charts with just one tweet.

The Twitter Chart from Hunted doesn't publish its algorithm but a quick comparison of the songs on each reveal they are clearly different. TweetTunes uses a pre-compiled database of artists and searches Twitter "every once in a while" to determine an artists' popularity.

None of these charts are extremely accurate in determining who or what is actually being listened to or purchased via the real-time online communications stream and it will be a long time before anyone replaces the Billboard charts as the chart of record, but they do give a pulse on what is being discussed and are excellent tools for discovering new music.

Baseball + Data Visualizations

by Craig Kanarick on July 11, 2009 | No Comments

Baseball is most likely the sport that utilizes statistics more than any other -- by both fans and those involved in the sport. Statistics have been recorded and published in pro baseball since the creation of pro leagues. This practice was started by cricket enthusiast and "father of baseball" Henry Chadwick in the 1860's (a 1876 example is to the left) and made common to fans in 1951, when researcher Hy Turkin published The Complete Encyclopedia of Baseball. Computers started analyzing baseball stats in 1969 and ever since, data visualizations of this data have become commonplace. Here are a few recent ones that I love:

In 2007, The New York Times published Paths to the Top of the Home Run Charts, a clean interactive visualization of leading home run hitters, plotting performance as a function of age. It is easy to compare the different players and to notice how Barry Bonds was the only player other than Babe Ruth to hit homers steadily regardless of age. This chart made me ponder how many more home runs The Babe might have hit had he not started his career as a non-hitting pitcher!

While not interactive, Flip Flop Fly Ball is a fan-tastic set of baseball graphs and charts. The colors, the typefaces and everything else about them is clean and easy to understand and as posters would make a great addition to any fan's room.

The most exciting recent development in baseball and statistics was featured in a front-page article in the New York Times on July 10. The article, titled With New System, Digital Eyes Will Chart Baseball's Unseen Skills, describes how digital cameras will now record the exact location and speed of the ball and every player on the field during a game, increasing the amount of data available to baseball junkies exponentially.

When baseball managers use this type of data to help their team, they are essentially performing business analytics, a key practice of any successful manager. My friend, Jack Mason, of IBM, explains this further in his recent blog entry.

Brand communications have become real-time

by Craig Kanarick on July 9, 2009

Over the past five years, the rise of mobile phones, SMS, Facebook, Twitter and other real-time driven technologies has been exponential. In addition, people have been shifting their media time from newspapers, television and other broadcast media to real-time, interactive media. Brands that want to live in the new world order need to understand these trends, embrace them, and respond accordingly.

We are the forefront of a world in which brands communicate in real-time with their consumers through digital channels. Some brands are experimenting with Twitter streams, frequent Facebook updates, live-chat driven customer support applications and other methods. Real-time (or near-real-time) communications aren't limited to digital channels, however -- when a company runs a "congratulations" commercial to the winner of a sporting event right after that winner was official (by producing different versions of the commercial in advance), they, too, are communicating in real time. What this shows is a passion for their field and an understanding of the expectations of the public: they want it and they want it now.

Recently in realtime

Sarkissian Mason Redesign

Four Ways of Looking at Twitter via HBR

Imogen Heap and Her Interactive Dress

Bigert&Bergström: Tomorrow's Weather

Reactive and Interactive Digital Billboards

Weekend Visualizations To Be Thankful For

Realtime: This site is being upgraded

Live Ships Map

The Press Agrees

Digital Painting "The Landing" by SWEATSHOPPE

FIFA Earth

United States Gross National Happiness on Facebook

Two Great New Self-Tracking Tools

Monitoring the Twitterverse

The SEC's New Media Policy is Forward-Thinking and Madness (UPDATED)

My Persona

Technology on the farm

Visualizing Our Goverment's IT Investments (UPDATED)

The NFL: Don't Tweet

Steven Johnson on The Future of News

Everything that can be tracked, will be?

Best Buy Gets It

Airlines and Twitter

Tour de France 2009

Tom's One for One Movement

PF Changs x Twitter = Customer Satisfaction

Personal Data Visualizations

Twitter Music Charts

Baseball + Data Visualizations

Brand communications have become real-time

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