Fascinated by the complexity captured in this map:

PresidentialWatch08 » Map

The circles represent political sites and blogs, color coded by category (political lean) and sized by authority (# of inbound links) or the magnitude of unrelated sites linking to it. This Map Key explains the methodology in detail.

The PresidentialWatch08 map is composed of the 533 most visible and influential websites and blogs - out of a complete dataset of over 4000 sites - using Linkfluence™’s proprietary crawl technology.

The map includes both social media and mainstream media outlets. The sites are divided into four different categories, or communities (manually labelled):

* Conservative
* Independent
* Infopit
* Progressive

Infopit are conversation starters, they can set the agenda. Most of them are mainstream media but a growing part is composed by social media.

Good information design should immediately give you an overall impression — in this case the balance, alignment and complexity of the political blogosphere — at first glance. Otherwise, the mass of data with no organizing principles or trends emerging obscures the information you’re trying to display.

In this case the model is not wholly self-explanatory, but once you dig in and see what they’re representing, I think it’s worth the energy it takes to parse it. If you’re still scratching your head after reading the Map Key, try this “notice” as well.

Unfortunately, I lost track of whose blog I found this on. Sorry!

Stan’s Cafe/Project Website: Of All the People in All the World. Read this writeup from Infosthetics.com (who deserve their own info impact rock star backstage pass).

For a moment, let’s go way, way far afield from your everyday “presenting” lives for a quick “information impact” lesson.

As I bookmarked this for the “Information impact rock stars” series, I thought: “But, as much impact as that has, you can’t really use it in a presentation.”

Ha.

1) If you mean a slideware-based presentation, sure you can. You can use large vivid photos of it.

2) But if you really mean presentation, as in shared physical space with live speaking, consider: physical objects asserting their bulk in real space trumps funky greyish bar charts anyday.

What could you demonstrate physically? How? What about metaphorically?

(This was modified from a post for SAP’s Marketing Community Meeting)

Graphic Recordings of the SXSW keynotes
Did you notice the woman at the front left of hall A during the keynotes, working in pastels and marker on a giant sheet of paper to diagram the talks as the unfolded?

Sunni Brown is an information design expert who creates Graphic Recordings of live events through her business BrightSpot Information Design. She graphically recorded each of the keynotes at SXSW (surprisingly, there’s no messiness or blood on the Zuckerburg one). You can follow the work here:

• Jane McGonigal
• Frank Warren
• Zuckerberg
• Harry Jenkins and Steven Johnson

Staring at the completed Facebook one, (reproduced in closeup above) I had a hard time believing it was not sketched out in advance and the lines and visuals filled in as the talk progressed. But with the interview format, she had to make it all up on the fly. I haven’t checked closely yet to see

This is amazing work. Both that she can convert concepts to visuals so quickly and effectively and in the clarity and energy of the results.

Have you seen Alltop?

I LOVE. LOVE. this interface for blasting through a lot of headlines & summaries fast. I wish my RSS reader could do this. Way to go, Electric Pulp.

Alltop has nine category sites: Celebrities, Egos, Fashion, Gaming, Mac, Oddities, Politics, Science and Sports.

Each site displays:

• Array of popular sources.
• Last 5 posts from each.
• Summaries on hover.

The look is sexy. I love the translucent static color bar that brands the site and houses the (minimalist) administrative links for the page.

Is this a future for RSS that will make sense and catch on “outside of the fishbowl?”

I also appreciate that “Egos” makes a point of promoting women’s voices. I noticed right away since Lena, Jeremiah and Geoff recently highlighted the topic. Thumbs up!

(Via Guy Kawasaki)

Full disclosure: Guy is a friend and gave me a sneak preview of this last month. Nice feeling, but that’s not why I’m raving about it.

Not only is this Wired infographic on the blog post ecosystem interesting to follow, I love how the information’s rendered and presented. On the downside the UI navigation was a little buggy, but on the upside it’s a cool approach to analyzing and displaying a slightly complex story.

The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits — to You

The graphic follows a theoretical blog reaction to a Budweiser Super Bowl commercial through a posse of bots, pings, scrapers, et al on its way to readers of various shapes. (And the readers really are a pretty funny shape!)

(Via Boing Boing)

Nice tidbit from The Tipping Point, Sesame Street researchers noticed how closely attention was tied to comprehension. Whenever the program got confusing, contentious or *flashy just for flashy’s sake, attention wandered. When the children understood what was going on, they paid rapt attention.

Now, anyone who had to read long, difficult academic papers in college (or any point in their lives) won’t find this the least bit surprising.

I say over and over to clients. You’re not “spoon feeding” information because they’re dumb, you’re packaging and framing it so that it’s easy to parse. Especially important when you consider keeping in mind the zillions of things battling for your listener’s attention.

*Anyone mesmerized by slide transitions, animations, fonts, effects & colors in PowerPoint should softly whisper this point over and over to themselves while editing a slide deck.

Jonathan Corum and Farhana Hossain put together this Circos/Clusterball style graphic for the New York Times to show the “naming of names” by and from each presidential candidate.

Found in Anand Athavale’s shared items, from O’Reilly Radar

This animation of data by state over time speaks volumes of the impact of high fructose corn syrup, portion sizes, school lunches, refined sugars, bleached flour, trans fats, sedentary lifestyles, advertising-generated insecurities, err, whatever it is that is causing weight gain, diabetes, etc. to increase across the board.

Points off for the color palette. Blue-red too contrasty to show incremental difference. It’s also misleadingly evocative of the political map. Here, blue is not opposite red. The sad truth of the 2006 “end state” is that every state but Colorado reports more than 20% of residents with BMIs over 30. Body image, lookism, sizeism be damned, what scares me most is the effect on health.

Honorary information impact rockstar award to Smashing Magazine for this phenomenal roundup of modern approaches to data visualization.

IMAGE: Amaztype returns icons for each search result in the shape of the keyword searched. Wow.

Organized into seven broad categories (mindmaps, displaying news, displaying data, displaying connections, displaying websites, articles & resources, and tools & services) the article profiles dozens of innovative approaches and provides more than 40 examples. From their introduction:

In fact, there are much better, profound, creative and absolutely fascinating ways to visualize data. Many of them might become ubiquitous in the next few years.

So what can we expect? Which innovative ideas are already being used? And what are the most creative approaches to present data in ways we’ve never thought before?

Nice to see past rockstars Information Architects Japan featured leading off the roundup.

More than enough compelling content here to revisit, think about, and chew on for weeks, especially if you are an information impact junkie like me. So let’s let this catch us up from a particularly dry spell on this blog and a long time since we awarded the last information impact rockstar. I’ll feature some of the particular approaches in future entries/awardees.

Tip of the hat to David Armano from his Twitterstream (@Armano).

The 2007 Web Trend map is out:

The 200 most successful websites on the web, ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective. We have done it again – and better. Upon popular demand – here is iA’s (Information Architects-Japan) next Web Trend Map:

As a whole, this maps an incredibly complex set of variables, relationships and information. Obviously another one you can’t just plunk down on a single “slide” and talk to… But parsed out and studied, some pretty interesting stories emerge.

The presentation isn’t the map, it’s the stories you tell with it.

UPDATE: Thanks Eric for pointing out the image’s hyperlink was broken. If it breaks again, try this Link