Gems Sty

As what’s stated in the picture, it’s quite easy to underestimate the size of Africa. Personally I’m rather surprised to see how many large countries Africa can comfortably hold -

It shows how Africa (30,3 million km²) is larger than the combination of China (9,6 million km²), the US (9,4 million km²), Western Europe (4,9 million km²), India (3,2 million km²) and Argentina (2,8 million km²), three Scandinavian countries and the British Isles (map gives no surface for these last two areas; I’ve rounded out the figures for the aforementioned regions).

[via Strangemaps]

Now what did those pictures look like? A really boring and not-to-mention uglily laid-out PowerPoint deck in Windows XP? Perhaps it even resembles what your work computer screen looks like? Perfect! That’s actually a screenshot from Read At Work, a website dedicated to making your sneaky non-work reading as ‘official’ as possible.

When you enter the site, it goes into a fake full-screen Windows mode, with several folders of ‘books’ for you to choose. The texts from these e-books are then churned into pseudo-PowerPoint slides, so you could while away your time reading your classic while appearing to be digesting a colleague’s Powerpoint presentation.

The lengths we go…

Tag Galaxy is a rather weird but interesting way of browsing through Flickr images - probably more for casual browsing than a specific search. You start off with a tag on a topic (which becomes your ‘central planet’) while other related tags appear in your galaxy. You can then click on those related tags and browse photos with both the original tag and the subsequent tag(s) (top picture).

And eventually, when you really do want to look at those photos, you can click on the planet and photos will ‘land’ on the planet (2nd picture).

I thought the visual/cognitive link between the two was a tad too literal and forced, but an interesting interface nonetheless for exploring images in a (pseudo)-3D space (yeah, space).

Noah Brier has released a very interesting web-application called Brand Tags. The premise is this: a brand is really what the consumer has in mind, the sum-of-all-thoughts regarding that particular brand-name or logo. Using the commonly-used representation of a tag cloud (in which the most popular entry gets the greatest font-size), we can see exactly what each brand (-word) means to the masses.

From the dominant word association, you can get a good feel of what it means as a whole, as various nuances and reactions play themselves out in the word-cloud. It is also quite intriguing to note (as the examples below show), how each brand can embed itself differently in the minds of consumers.

Product/Function
For Bic, for instance, it is very strongly tied to its single most successful product - the pen. Its iconic and classic status mirrors the consumer’s impression of “Bic = Pen”. In this case, the brand is the product, much like how Xerox came to be a substitution for photocopying.

Marketing Tagline
It could also be a reflection of the success of a brand-marketing campaign. For Intel, the most dominant word wasn’t chips, computers or anything like that. It was ‘Inside’. It just shows how strong the ad campaign was to imprint this message into consumer’s heads (even as you read this, perhaps the signature Intel jingle rang through your brain).

Associated Emotion
I must admit I was rather surprised with Harley-Davidson though. In many business textbooks, Harley was a frequent example used to illustrate how the ‘freedom’ and ‘rebellious’ spirit was core to Harley-Davidson’s business. But it does seem like the crowd has a rather different take (although it is still a feeling for a brand):

Perhaps it’s time to rework the campaigns a little?

Anyway, there are quite many more brands on the website - head over and play around!

[via swissmiss]

It’s the time of the year for Oscars and what-not, where critics and audience can opine on the great movies of the year, hits-and-misses etc. Of course, what the studio “suits” see as hits or misses are perhaps more centered at the basic question - did it bring in good money? The New York Times has a great interactive graphic showing the major movies all the way from 1986. You can see the impacts of the movie and how it pans out - the height being the weekly revenue, while the width represents the longevity. For instance, on the bottom left, the big slice would be the rather persistent Titanic.

Recently I’m getting quite interested in infographics or infosthetics - the art of visualizing information. Beyond the eye-candy factor (many of these are really well-done; the interactivity afforded on many of these infosthetics make it really engaging too), it’s also about making information appealing - and thus promote its usefulness. People like Hans Rosling and Jonathan Harris really earn my admiration for bringing what is usually dead-boring statistics/information into engaging, illuminative and dare I say, fun thing to play/learn?