Broken on Purpose: Why Getting It Wrong Pays More Than Getting It Right - 'It doesn’t end with Facebook, either. Being broken pays off, so social media is often deliberately broken. In fact, nearly every major social network, site or app has greedily pursued this logic.' [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns on Sep 30, 2012 - 92 comments

Architectural theorist David Gissen has recently been travelling through France to learn about wine. His dedicated Twitter account @100aocs has attracted the attention of sommeliers, importers, and winemakers. Edible Geography caught up with Gissen to discuss wine, wine culture, geography, and Gissen's re-thought wine map of France based on Metro maps such as London's Tube map. How Wine Became Metropolitan: An Interview with David Gissen.
posted by shakespeherian on Sep 8, 2011 - 9 comments

Twaggies, turn your tweets into pics. Take random weird tweets and turn them into even weirder visuals. Twaggies, a website by Kiersten Essenpreis, features illustrations by the extraordinary @K_Essenpreis. (Essen is the German verb for “to eat” and preis means “praise.” So you better leave some nice comments for her or she’ll twag you most unfavorably.) The other half of the team is David Isreal, @resila, who can’t draw a stick figure much less a twaggie, but does all the other stuff for the blog and hit on the idea for it in the first place. Three additional twaggers have contributed in the past – @yaelbt, @mmbemer and @hsugene.
posted by Fizz on Jul 30, 2010 - 13 comments

Newmoticons: Fresh new emoticons for happy internet people.
posted by The Whelk on Nov 14, 2009 - 80 comments

Love Helvetica and modernist typographic design? Seen the film? Now, with the power of browser userscripts, you can have the 20th-century high-modernist experience in your favourite web applications. Scripts exist to Helveticise Gmail, Twitter and Google Reader, and work with a variety of modern browsers. [more inside]
posted by acb on Sep 15, 2009 - 69 comments

How to make a newspaper out of blog entries. Ben Terrett and Russell Davies explain how they turned their friends’ (and strangers’) blog posts, Twits, and Flickr photos into the thousand-copy broadsheet Things Our Friends Have Written on the Internet 2008.
posted by joeclark on Jan 14, 2009 - 23 comments

Stream graphs, or stacked graphs, are a new form of (sometimes interactive) visualization that present data in a fluid timescale format. For example, the NY Times website has a graph showing the box office receipts from 1996-2008. There's a Twitter streamgraph based on keywords. Here's one of all the musicians a Last.fm user has listened to over time. Track the popularity of baby names back to the 1880s. Possibly the most striking, if not necessarily intuitive, is this visualization of US population by county, 1790-2000. There's already an academic study of the technique.
posted by desjardins on Jul 31, 2008 - 27 comments