It's All About The Images

Here’s some irony for you. It’s All About The Images infographic from MDG Advertising relays information visually about the importance of relaying information visually.  Yes, it’s very meta.

Some say image is everything, and that’s especially true on the Internet where the shift to visual optimization is playing an increasingly important role in the recent phenomenon of photo marketing. In light of their numerous benefits for brands of all kinds, MDG Advertising developed an insightful infographic that illustrates the influence of images on a company’s business, branding, search, and social media efforts. For insight on optimizing images for content and commerce, along with advice on image optimization techniques, take a look at the following infographic to see why images can help make success a snap.

In our world, this information is true for posting infographics as well as photo images.

Thanks for sending in the link!

The United States of Craigslist

Welcome to The United States of Craiglist! This infographic map, found on the IDV User Experience blog, shows approximately how craigslist divides its geographic zones across the U.S.! Very important for a website who bases its usefulness on location!

WHY?  Locality is inherent to the value of craigslist; I go to craigslist.org but I get kicked over to the local instance of craigslist (my IP address sources me to somewhere in the illustrious Lansing, MI).  But how does craigslist know where to send me?   Some mysterious system of assigning a geocoded IP address to just the right site must be in place…I wonder what that map looks like.

When Ian Clemens proposed the idea, I looked around to find an existing map of craigslist sites-to-areas -maybe even find the lookup that they themselves use. I couldn’t find anything like it.
Whether it matches their system well or not, here is a map that approximates geographic coverage to individual sites using a Voronoi process as a base (more info on process below).  It is at least a start at visualizing the geographic coverage and distribution of the community-driven instances of craigslist.  Shapes like this might provide some useful context for other data, demographic or market information, for instance.  Also, when pulled into VFX, it can serve as an input to some spatial querying on those other metrics.

It’s worth noting that this is not from Craigslist at all, but an outside analysis of the cities from the craigslist site and approximates the geographic areas covered by each.  A complete post about how this map was generated is available here, and they have even made all of the data files available in a number of different formats.  Bonus!

Craigslist doesn’t care about state lines, counties, time zones or voting districts.  They care about defining an area that covers certain population levels that effectively use their service.

Thanks to Jim for sending in the link!

The Internet of Things

Intel has designed a large infographic, The Internet of Things that explores the growing number of devices connected to the Internet since 1960 through predictions up to 2020.  (NOT to be confused with The Internet of Things infographic released by Cisco earlier this year with the same name)  High-Resolution PDF version, additional information and the data files are available here.

The Internet is evolving, again. Every day, billions of people connect to the Internet through billions of devices – PCs, smartphones and TVs to name just a few. While the PC remains at the centre of this evolution, Internet connectivity is now embedded into cars, fitness equipment, factory robots and vending machines. This smarter, connected world has the potential to change how we live.

We’re entering a new phase of Internet evolution. It is expanding much more rapidly than it has done in the last decade. Increasing numbers of everyday appliances are connecting to the Internet, their environment and to each other. Cars, fitness equipment, factory robots, retail signage and vending machines are becoming ‘smart’ thanks to tiny embedded computer processors and sensors, just like those in your laptop or mobile phone.

I have mixed feelings about this one.  It’s visually attractive, and would make a really nice printed poster.  The data is valuable and interesting, apparently gathered from a large number of disparate sources, but the URL listed at the bottom to view the sources didn’t work for me.

However, all of the colored lines aren’t actually connecting any events or actually combining to create a visualization of the values on the left side of the page.  While it visually implies the growing connections to the Internet and complexity, it doesn’t have any connection to the actual data.

I like the circle diagram at the bottom of the growing millions of PCs sold every day, but the “80% of of all PCs shipped today have Intel Inside” turned a fun, informative infographic into an ad and could turn off some readers.

Thanks to Emma for sending in the link!

Real Estate: Social Media Killed the Blog Star

Another good infographic from Fixr.com about the how the real estate industry is changing.  Social Medai Killed the Blog Star: Real Estate looks at how buyers are finding their information online and who are the most influential blogs and real estate people on Twitter.

I like the use of company logos and Twitter profile images.  I also like that all of the data is built-in to the pie charts and bar charts to make it easier for the readers to comprehend.

The side-by-side Top 10 lists are interesting, but because they’re based on different measurements (followers vs. Alexa page rank), the graphic should give the reader some context of how to compare the different values.  Why do these lists support the overall message that social media is more important than blogging?

Some major technical errors as well.  Pie chart percentages should ALWAYS add up to 100%.  The pie charts here add up to 71%, 99%, 91% and 100%, which means that the visual of the slice sizes doesn’t match the data.  You never want your data visualizations to tell a story that isn’t supported by the data.

Thanks to Raul for sending in the link!