Social Media Around the World: Current Trends and Future Growth
A look around the globe reveals a diverse social media marketplace and plenty of opportunities for marketers. …
What I’m Reading
Shareworthy articles and content syndicated from other sites. These aren’t things I’ve written or necessarily endorse, for the record.
Data in a physical context
We’ve seen this sort of thing before, but it doesn’t ever seem to get old. Peter Ørntoft takes some data and puts it into physical context:
The project deals with data from a list of the social related interests of the Danish people. The list is the result of an opinion poll from a major consultancy company in Denmark. I have used the context of specific opinion polls within each interest to shape and design diagrams. By doing so the receiver understands more layers of information about the data.
The graphics above and below show Danish opinion on whether it’s ethical to wear religious symbols in public professions. At their core, they’re just pie charts. Embed them on clothing relevant to the topic though, and somehow they become more than that.
What do you think – does it lend to better understanding, or at the very least, make you care more?
[Behance via Chart Porn]
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An Awesome jQuery Plugin For Creating Magical Layouts – Isotope
Isotope is an impressive jQuery plugin that enables us to sort items and create smart layouts.
Using the plugin, any given list of items can be filtered with show/hide effects and they can be re-ordered with slick animations.
The plugin's layout features are very powerful as well. With a simple function, items can be converted into horizontal/vertical layouts or arranged intelligently within a grid and much more. And, all with nice animations.
Isotope’s animation engine takes advantage of the best browser features when available — CSS transitions and transforms, GPU acceleration — but falls back to JavaScript animation when they are not available.
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Twitter Dots: Mapping all Tweets for a specific Keyword
Twitter Dots [twitterdots.com] translates individual tweets as simple dots on a geographical world map. It is as simple as that. The actual keyword changes each day.
Still interesting to observe how a timeline animation shows some people still tweet “Good Morning” in the late evening… That or the geographical location might be off for a lot of people (e.g. overseas holidays?).
More information is available here.
Just How Open Is Your Internet? [INFOGRAPHICS]
America, the champion of democracy and freedom, actually has more Internet censorship than some countries in Africa and South America according to an infographic based on Internet censorship research conducted by the OpenNet Initiative.
The U.S. and Canada are listed as “some censorship” along with much of Western Europe. Russia and Australia ranked lower as “Under Surveillance,” while China and parts of the Middle East ranked at the bottom for “Pervasive Censorship.”
As for what kinds of content is censored, the research found that “blogs” were the most censored content at 20% while “militant groups” only ranked at 1%. Surprisingly, locally focussed NGOs tied for third-most censored at 9%.
Even though the research from OpenNet comes from top minds at at The Citizen Lab, University of Toronto, and the Harvard Law School, it raises some inherent problems with defining “censorship.” For example, screening out child pornography and illegal file sharing technically registers as “censorship” even though most people wouldn’t consider that a human rights offense. It would be naive, however, to assume that all that surveillance was well-intentioned, especially when applied in countries that restrict social networking sites or limit access to the Internet.
Perhaps that’s why locally focussed NGO’s sometimes rank so highly in types of censored content. Quashing protest or opposition is much different from removing illegal content. Even still, it’s strange to see local efforts so outrank international NGOs, regional NGOs and even independent media.
It’s also possible that the results could be skewed by the quantity of people on the Internet and their available bandwidth.
The OpenNet research and the infographic (created by a Design & Technology MFA candidate at Parsons, NY) is imperfect. Still, it offers an interesting glimpse at how “developed” countries stack up against the rest of the world and what content — if any — is targeted for censorship. You can sign a petition against censorship at the bottom of the graphics page.
Let us know your thoughts and conclusions in the comments below.
More About: censorship, government, infographic, infographics, ngo, ngos, non-profit, social media, trending
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