To celebrate their fifth birthday, the folks at digg released another labs application to the general public. It’s called digg365 and lines itself up next to digg stack or digg swarm from previous years.

The application is controlled by a radial calender interface and the top stories from the selected time-period or category are displayed around it. The more diggs a story received, the bigger it appears in the application. The stories show a subtle movement and reveal spring-like behavior if you try to drag and drop them.

The controller is equipped with the filter possibilities Category and Time. The granularity for time can range from viewing a whole year down to a specific day. The quarters are color coded with a vibrant color-palette.

Something that stands out is the love of detail. Every little animation seems to be well designed — from loading bar to day selection. It is a visualization with a entertaining appeal and a technically savvy target-audience, therefore I think it’s adequately designed.

Something I couldn’t find out was the creator of the visualization. Do you have any idea who designed and developed it? I would appreciate every hint in this direction, thanks!

Via Infosthetics.com

The interface for DoodleBuzz is simply a scribbled line. Draw a straight line. Draw a curved line. Draw a crazy, chaotic, all-over-the-place messed up line. It’s up to the user how he wants to layout the information.

The application is programmed in AS3 and it uses the News API from Daylife.com. Furthermore for the default search Brendan used Dapper to scrape the top headlines from the Daylife.com homepage.

I have to admit I liked the idea of a more playful interface to news reading, but got quikly distracted by the aesthetics of scribbling with the pen and seeing the typographic results. How about you? Did you like the playful interface? Did it provide any help in finding related or maybe unforseen news stories?

Application stages

The application has two different running states. The first one is a progressional real-time feed of post entries and the second provides a browsing experience to the user. The following principles should describe the application flow in more detail:

• The author’s name would occasionally pop on the screen and dropping an item into the application. The names behave like floating bubbles interacting with each other by pushing away and bouncing off each other.
• The dropped item float to the bottom of the application and simultaneously fading away. Once an item reached the floor it merges into the sediment layer. The sediment layer consists of all the previously posted items. The width of an item depends on the amount of already posted items in the layer (fig. 01).
• The names also begin to fade away but stay longer on the sky if the author has dropped several items – so the more a author contributes the longer his name will be visible.
• By hovering over an author’s name the user sees all the connected posts (fig. 02).
• By hovering over an item in the sediment layer the user gets to see more details about the item shown in a tooltip (fig. 03).
• By clicking on an author’s name the user switches to the browse mode and the continuously stream stopps flowing. Now the author’s latest post gets shown in the center of the screen (fig. 04). Closely related post items (same author, same title or same link) get organized on the primary hierarchy level. Loosely related posts (same type and similar publishing date) gets organized on the secondary hierarchy level.
• Once a post is selected the user can skip through related posts by using the left and right arrows beside the post (fig. 05).
• by clicking on the world icon the user is taken to the original publishing location of the viewed post item (fig. 06).
• Sources can be filtered by checking or unchecking the source box (fig. 07).
• The scale of the timeline can be varied using the toolbox by hovering over the date icon (fig. 08). Scale presets are “Day”, “Week” and “Month”. The sediment layer will therefore be filled with post items from today, the current week or the whole current month. using the calender interface the user has the option to check the state of the community for a certain date or time period.

fig. 01 – flowing state

fig. 02 – author’s posts

fig. 03 – tooltip

fig. 04 – hierarchy state

fig. 05 – skip through related posts

fig. 06 – link to origin

fig. 07 – date toolbox

fig. 08 – source filtering

Hopefully these explanations give more insight in the concept I’m working on. I encourage you to hand in any feedback that you might come up with. If there is anything I should clearify, please let me know.

The whole set of visualizations can be found on Flickr.

Also the NY Times visualizations are available on Flickr or see our coverage thereof on datavisualization.ch.

The platform consists of two major components:

1. The Content AP (Access their content database)
2. The Data Store (High quality and curated datasets free to download)

The platform is currently in beta trial and only limited acces will be granted.

If you want to use the Content API, read the Getting started guide and apply for a key.

(Via ReadWriteWeb & Information Aestethics)

News Kitter

The description of the project’s production system and the data source from the official website:

News Knitter converts information gathered from the daily political news into clothing. Live news feed from the Internet that is broadcasted within 24 hours or a particular period is analyzed, filtered and converted into a unique visual pattern for a knitted sweater. The system consists of two different types of software: whereas one receives the content from live feeds the other converts it into visual patterns, and a fully computerized flat knitting machine produces the final output. Each product, sweater of News Knitter is an evidence/result of a specific day or period.

News Knitter was created from {casual data} – a collective of artists and designers crafting artefacts using casual public data. The collection has already been featured in various media from print to web and it’s been presented on a large range of exhibitions.

As you can tell by my enthusiasm I’m completely blown away by the idea, the look and the product itself. And if there’s anybody out there that could help me get one of these… my size would be male M and I like the Thematic Bars the best.

Our concept

We here at Datavisualization.ch are very fond of the open source mentality and are using most of the Mozilla products on a daily basis. Therefore we couldn’t let the chance pass us by and not submitting something. So here goes my concept:

I’ve chosen the sea as a metaphore. News items get dropped into it and then float to the ground where they get arranged and archived just like sediments in the sea. The names of the authors or creators float in the air and arrange themselves just like a swarm of birds.News items basically consist of an author, date, title, body text and a link to the original ressource. Items can be viewed in a more detailed version by clicking on it.

By hovering over a name one can see the items by this author.

When a post is viewed in more detail it pulls related posts in a hierarchic view. Related posts could be by the same author, covering the same topic, edits on the same wiki page or reporting of the same bug.

To get an overview over past days the user can “dig” deeper in the ground and reveal past layers of sediments. By the density and chromaticity of the layer one can judge what happened during the day without having to view every post by itself. This creates a fingerprint and patterns for different activities in the community could emerge.

I encourage you to leave your feedback about the visualization – I know there’s always space for improvement.

Blogposts, Newsitems and social mentions gets represented by bubbles falling from the top mimiking physical behaviour which doesn’t make the visualization more usefull (no dragging, no dropping) but an entertaining effect emerges from the bubbles piling up.

The date selection tool is definitely worth a look. You can choose the length of the period of time by scaling the scrollbar up and down. Startdate and enddate can the be changed by moving it on the bended x-axis.