Adactio: Links

datalist experiment

This is wonderful stuff! I’m a big fan of the datalist element but I hadn’t realised how it could be combined with input types like range and date.

So nifty!

A collection of those appalling doublespeek announcements that sites and services give when they get acquired. You know the ones: they begin with “We’re excited to announce…” and end with people’s data being flushed down the toilet.

Google Keep? It’ll probably be with us until March 2017 - on average

Charles Arthur analyses the data from Google’s woeful history of shutting down its services.

So if you want to know when Google Keep, opened for business on 21 March 2013, will probably shut - again, assuming Google decides it’s just not working - then, the mean suggests the answer is: 18 March 2017. That’s about long enough for you to cram lots of information that you might rely on into it; and also long enough for Google to discover that, well, people aren’t using it to the extent that it hoped.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind: A visualization of drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004

This powerful timeline illustrates how drone attacks have increased dramatically under Obama’s administration.

Impact of Responsive Designs

I heartily concur with Luke’s call for sharing of data:

If you’ve had success with a responsive design, my plea to you is to please share what you’ve learned.

I’m going to see if I can get some Clearleft clients to open up.

Inside the Battle of Hoth: The Empire Strikes Out

A damning analysis of the Empire’s military strategy at the battle of Hoth, complete with illustrations. The comments are good too:

Guys, cut Palpatine some slack. He’s still in his first term as Emperor…

Flickr, codeswarming

A beautiful timelapse visualisation of code commits to Flickr from 2004 to 2011.

Medaler.com

I know have a visualisation of my public data in the form of 3D-printed snowflake, thanks to Medaler.

Interstellar Hard Drive - The Morning News

Investigating the options for off-world backups.

Data is only as safe as the planet it sits on. It only takes one rock, not too big, not moving that fast, to hit the Earth at a certain angle and: WHAM! Most living species are done for.

How the hell is your Twitter archive supposed to survive that?

Jan V. White

Eight of Jan White’s excellent books on graphic design are now available for free online, licensed under CC0 …they’re in the public domain now.

All he asks in return is that you might buy one of his books still in print, and maybe make a donation to the Internet Archive.

Jan V. White is a mensch.

10 Years of Scrobbling Timeline – Last.fm

A really nice interactive timeline of data from ten years of scrobbling music to Last.fm.

I Don’t Need No Stinking API: Web Scraping For Fun and Profit | Hartley Brody

A handy step-by-step guide to scraping HTML to get data out. Useful for services (—cough—Twitter—cough—) that keep changing the rules of their API use.

When the Nerds Go Marching In - Alexis C. Madrigal - The Atlantic

The fascinating story of how a dream team of geeks helped Obama to victory. Personally, I think it’s all about the facial hair. I mean, how could they lose with Trammell’s beard to guide them?

Paris and the Data Mind - The Morning News

Craig writes about the hologram of his quantified self.

A List Apart: Articles: Everything in its Right Pace

A great article by Hannah, focusing on the Long Web—it isn’t about the quantity of data you’re publishing; it’s the quality. This builds nicely on the article I linked to recently about digital scarcity.

Distant Shape: 10 Years of Daring Fireball

A nice visualisation of Apple’s transition From desktop to mobile over ten years, one Daring Fireball article at a time.

Oh, and happy birthday, Daring Fireball.

How to support full Unicode in MySQL databases · Mathias Bynens

Some good database character-encoding advice from Mathias.

Special Report #1: Data Protection — Contents Magazine

This is an important subject (and one very close to my heart) so I’m very glad to see these data protection guidelines nailed to the wall of the web over at Contents Magazine.

Treat our data like it matters.
No upload without download.
If you close a system, support data rescue.

As We May Think - The Atlantic

Vannevar Bush’s original 1945 motherlode of hypertext.

The Evolution of the Web

A nice timeline visualisation of recent history.

KyleBean.co.uk - Portfolio: Mobile Evolution

Kyle’s Matryoshka phones are as cool as they are cute.

Google Transparency Report

Google’s datadump makes for a fascinating—and worrying—bit of data dumpster diving.

I can tell you how I got from Deep Purple to Howling Wolf in just 25 moves. | Chloe Weil

The way that Chloe has catalogued her music over time is fascinating. It’s like the Long Now opposite of This Is My Jam.

HTTP Compression use by Alexa Top 1000 | Zoompf

An in-depth analysis (graphs! data!) of how popular sites are using—or not using—compression.

Myself, quantified | Extenuating Circumstances

Dan writes about how data saved his life. That is not an exaggeration.

He describes how, after receiving some very bad news from his doctor, he dived into the whole “quantified self” thing with his health data. Looking back on it, he concludes:

If I were still in the startup game, I have a pretty good idea of which industry I’d want to disrupt.

A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945 - by Isao Hashimoto - YouTube

A beautiful and disturbing piece of data visualisation. The numbers are quite astonishing.

What Goes Up, Doesn’t Have To Come Down

A thoughtful—and beautifully illustrated—piece by Geri on memory and digital preservation, prompted by the shut-down of Gowalla.

The world’s undersea internet cables - interactive | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Explore the shape of the underwater world of internet backbones.

Google, what were you thinking? ← Mocality Kenya

Stef does some data-sleuthing and uncovers some shocking behaviour on the part of Google in Kenya.

Dark data, and how frustrating it is that we can’t see the forest from the trees – Helloform

Fred touches on the same issues that Frank highlighted in his dConstruct talk last year: what do we do with all of this wealth of material we’ve been collecting/ffffinding/scrobbling/liking/favouriting/plus-one-ing.

angry, productive birds (tecznotes)

Mashing up Angry Birds and spreadsheets to better visualise project time-tracking.

A Responsive Design Approach for Complex, Multicolumn Data Tables | Filament Group, Inc., Boston, MA

A really nice pattern for data tables in responsive designs. Just as with conditional loading, the key point is making a distinction between essential and optional content.

Simon Collison | Colly | Journal | My digital preservation utopia

Colly’s thoughts on digital preservation are written in a lighthearted tongue-in-cheek way but at least he’s thinking about it. That alone gives me comfort.

Occupy George

A stroke of genius: turning money itself into the carrier for infographics on wealth distribution in America.

The Great Universe of Data on Vimeo

One of the opening lightning talks at Science Hack Day in San Francisco by Sean Herron of NASA.

Goodbye time, datetime, and pubdate. Hello data and value. | HTML5 Doctor

A very even-handed look at the time and data debacle in HTML5.

The trouble with font classifications | Clagnut § Design thinking · Typography

Richard would like your help. Take a few minutes to run through a card-sorting exercise to help classify fonts in a more meaningful way.

10 Charts About Sex « OkTrends

This is may just be the best thing on the internet about data visualisation and statistics. And sex.

Secret Servers | booktwo.org

A great piece by James on the architecture, aesthetics and perception of datacenters.

BBC Dimensions: How Many Really?

A nice project from BERG that aligns numbers from your own world (like the number of people you follow on Twitter) to numbers in the larger world.

Times Higher Education - Memory failure detected

A worrying report on the state of digital preservation and the web, specifically in the UK. Welcome to the memory hole.

Escaping the Digital Dark Age

Stewart Brand wrote this twelve years ago: it’s more relevant than ever in today’s cloud-worshipping climate.

I’d like to think that it’s ironic that I’m linking to The Wayback Machine because the original URL for this essay is dead. But it isn’t ironic, it’s horrific.

Google

A fascinating examination by Hixie of web technologies that may have technically been “better” than HTML, but still found themselves subsumed into the simpler, more straightforward, good ol’ hypertext markup language.

The follow-on comments are definitely worth a read too.

See something or say something - a set on Flickr

These lovely visualisations of geotagged photos and tweets are almost indistinguishable from aerial views of cities at night.

Unhosted - Imagine personal data freedom…

This looks like it might be worth investigating as one potential solution to the sharecropping problem: code for decentralising your data; you allow apps to access your data but you get to decide where that data lives. Intriguing.

Experience Is What We Make It | UX Magazine

The Riegers are like emissaries from Planet Smart and we mere mortals are fortunate that they take the time to give us great articles like this.

Tell-all telephone | Data Protection | Digital | ZEIT ONLINE

A dataviz demo of creepiness: displaying the movements of Malte Spitz by correlating her phone activity and web usage.

Tidy Street electricity usage | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

I really like this idea: one street in Brighton is openly displaying its electricity usage over time.

a world of tweets

A very pretty visualisation of tweets on a map using canvas.

Digitale data in gevaar! - Datanews.be

If you speak Flemish, you might enjoy this article based on a chat I had with a Belgium journalist.

If you don’t speak Flemish, well, just move along.

Open Planets Foundation | digital, forever

This consortium of institutions and universities came together “to provide practical solutions and expertise in digital preservation.”

PLANETS stands for Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services.

ID card database destroyed - a set on Flickr

For once, I’m happy to see data being destroyed.

MTA.ME

The New York subway schedule converted into sound by treating each line as a string.

YouTube - Tracking 18th-century “social network” through letters

Visualising the Republic of Letters.

City Crawlers Berlin

This looks like it could be a good book: a collaborative project to find patterns and stories in the data of one city.

Oh, and the site is lovely and responsive.

A History of the World in 100 Seconds on Vimeo

A gorgeous visualisation of Wikipedia data from History Hack Day. Watch the shape of the world emerge over time.

Victorian Infographics - a set on Flickr

Some beautiful pieces of data visualisation.

Lost Bomber – Techbelly

Using data to help put a single death in the family into a wider perspective.

Notabilia – Visualizing Deletion Discussions on Wikipedia

Visualisations of the history of controversial Wikipedia articles.

No More Sharecropping!

A site dedicated to the principle of homesteading your data.

Time Zones

A very handy tool for planning intercontinental communication.

Dead Drops Database

London has its first data dead drop. Time to put Brighton on the map methinks.

Romance has lived too long upon this river

A glanceable indication of the current Thames tide, from James Bridle.

Mashup Breakdown - Girl Talk

A visual representation of each track on the new Girl Talk album.

Draggables

Watch this space. Glenn has a really interesting idea (and implementation) for exchanging structured data between browser windows using drag'n'drop.

Old Weather - Our Weather's Past, the Climate's Future

What a superb project! Forget Mechanical Turk — this is the way to harness the collective intelligence of humans: transcribing weather observations made by naval ships at the beginning of the twentieth century. It's all grist for the climate model mill.

Tags: data

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