I thought today would be as good as any to promote worthy people/events/music from the blog.

1. Web Analytics Wednesday! Its a networking/social thing, that will (obviously) include beer and food. I’ve never been to one, but I’m planning on attending this.  My favorite part is the “drink responsibly” warning at the bottom. RSVP here.
2. Brazen Lungs.  A band based out of Dublin, the name comes from an Edgar Allen Poe poem (so you know they’re legit). Check them out here.
3. Guinness Record Zombie Walk.  The super cool and fun Fremont Outdoor Cinema is trying to organize the world’s largest zombie walk finished off with a viewing of “Shaun of the Dead“. Its happening tomorrow, July 3rd. Details here.
4. Free Online (or in person if you’re in Seattle) Flash Classes.  Generously hosted by CreativeTechs, and a very useful skill to have for prototyping or general web development. Sign up here.
5. Ladies and Gentlemen.  Another awesome band with an acoustic/folksy vibe, in Seattle (specifically Ballard-ish area), who I think is playing on July 27th. Listen to them here.

And finally my song of the day: Herringbone by Department of Eagles.

So in my continuing quest to figure out new ways to visualize data, I came across this article through The Grok, (which I realize is from 2007) in Smashing Magazine on new and interesting approaches to data visualization.  I tested some of them out and I wanted to share and post pictures of the results (though some are better when in action than still).

1. Amaztype.  These people utilize Amazon Web Services to make a word of your choice based on book/album/dvd covers. You can sort of see the graphic design trends that people follow. I especially like that Goodnight Moon made it onto the Night visualization.
   

   Night

   

   Light

2. Death of the Pie Chart.  Using pixels instead of pie charts to demonstrate relative size. I like it.
   

   Pixel graphs

3. We Feel Fine.  This site does amazing things to get a sense of how the world is doing by “harvesting feelings from weblogs.” You can filter based on feeling, gender, age, weather, location, and date for 6 different ways of viewing the data. I tried out Madness, Montage, Murmurs and Mobs.
   

   Filtered Madness by the feeling "sad", possibly about Michael Jackson.

   

   An image from Montage.

4. Websites as graphs.  Graphs by the HTML code, so tables, links, images, etc. get different colored nodes. I made a graph of this site but I didn’t think it looked too interesting.
5. Book/essay word visualization.  A German Interaction Design Institute wanted to show the connection between words and ideas better and made an awesome sort of Venn diagram. One pretty much includes everything that I learned at the iSchool, and some extra German words tossed in.
   

   Visualization of words in an interaction design text.

6. The Shape of Song.  Graphical representations of music. I did one for Chopin’s Nocturne in E flat.
   

   Visualization of Nocturne in E flat.

7. Visual Complexity.  The mother lode of data visualization, a large gallery of different types. I was really fascinated by the transportation ones.  The ones I’m showing here are of the global internet distribution and the blogosphere from “inspirer” radiating to “inspiree.”
   

   Global internet distribution

   

   Blogosphere from inspirer in the center radiating to inspiree.