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The New York Times site traffic, World View, June 25, 2009

Site traffic visualization to nytimes.com from mobile and web users on June 25, 2009. Design and programming by Michael Young, Noriaki Okada and Nick Bilton.

Playgrounds in NY:

PlayaroundNYC is an interesting example of where social visualization meets captology. The website was specifically created to help New Yorkers explore how well their neighborhoods are supported by playgrounds and to investigate how this support is tempered by nearby conditions. The aim is that with better understanding, New Yorkers will be in a better position to act to both improve the availability and quality of neighborhood playgrounds.
The neighborhood playground support map is the result of combining several different types of data sets. First, each playground was assigned a quality rating. Currently quality is mainly determined by nearness to major and minor truck routes. A grid of points were then sampled on the map, by determining the nearest playgrounds, walking distance to these playgrounds, and the quality of these playgrounds. These factors are combined to assign each point an overall rating which estimates how well that area is supported by playgrounds. Lastly, the various support ratings are interpolated to generate the heatmap visual effect.

» Web Trend Map 4 - Final Beta

Download: For the last feedback round, all we offer is a PNG (2.6MB). There are more formats to come.

» Own your Choices

Own Your Choices is claimed to be the “first-ever choice making community”. At first, the website was part of the Own your C campaign, and meant to encourage teens not to smoke. Currently, it aims to reveal how personal choices affect others and characterize one’s self. In particular, the website focuses on starting the conversation around topics such as tobacco, health, self-image, culture, alcohol, relationships and school. Users are invited to connect with peers on these issues, to share their opinion and influence the conversation. And by accident, the interface seems driven by simple dynamic graphs of the statists resulting from the data-gathering surveys.

Individual people are represented by small outer sectors on a circle, which are linked to individual profile pages. One can use filters on the right side of the screen, for instance to filter by gender, age or location, or to find like-minded peers, or complete opposites. More colors means more activity

» ThoughtPile: Aggregating the Best Ideas in the World

Thoughtpile is an open invitation to share the best ideas with the world about important, emerging topics, such as “How can we agree what needs to change?”, “How can technology become more human”, and so on. Unfortunately, as a demo version only, posting and counting has been disabled.
The interface has some compelling and neatly designed 3D effects in conveying the ideas and their according like/dislike votes.

» Social Collider

The Social Collider data visualization reveals cross-connections between conversations on Twitter. One can search for usernames or topics, which are tracked through time and visualized much like the way a particle collider draws pictures of subatomic matter. Posts that did not resonate with anyone just connect to the next item in the stream. The ones that did, however, spin off and horizontally link to users or topics who relate to them, either directly or in terms of their content.

» Social Weather Mapping | smalltalk

Social Weather Mapping geo-locates recent tweets in the US that contain the terms “sunny”, “rainy”, “snowy”, “windy”, and “foggy”. The size of the circles are determined by the number of tweets, and are colored by its current dominant weather. As sufficient “weather” data is aggregated, it can be used to form a multi-dimensional picture of the weather and the effect is has on our lives.

» Bicycle Built for Two Thousand

Bicycle Built For 2,000 is comprised of 2,088 short voice recordings collected via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk web service, assembled together to sing the song Daisy Bell. In 1962, the IBM 704 became the first computer to sing, singing the song Daisy Bell.

Online workers were prompted to listen to a short sound clip, then record themselves imitating what they heard. Each person was paid $0.06 for their participation via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk web service. The work is accompanied by a visual interface that allows the exploration of the large collection of voices.

» DaisyDisk

With DaisyDisk you can free up disk space by quickly finding and deleting big, useless files.

The program scans a disk and displays its content as a sector diagram where the biggest files and folders at once become obvious. To drill down to a folder, just click on a segment. To bubble up, click in the center. Move the mouse over the diagram and see the name and path of each file, and enclosed files (if any). Hit Space to quickly preview file content, without launching another application. Ctrl-click to open a file in Finder.

» The world's eyes

Los ojos del mundo (the world’s eyes) illustrates the photos people visiting Spain leave behind on Flickr as evidence of contemporary tourism in the country. Through data mining and visualization techniques, the project uncovers the evolution of the presence and flows of tourists. As photos pill up to reflect the intensity of the tourist activity, they uncover where tourists are, where they come from and what they are interested in capturing and sharing from their visit. The analysis and mapping of this data allows understanding the attractiveness of leisure cities and their points of interest. In contrast it also reveals the unphotographed regions of Spain still free from the tourist buzz.