BEAUTIFUL DATA

Bryan Eisenberg had this great post this week about 69 Free (or low cost) Tools to Improve Your Website. I went through most of them last night and thought it was a great collection of web services you can use to help with backlinks, keywords, SEO, and the overall effectiveness of your website.

Research giant Nielsen has put its social media monitoring service BuzzMetrics into a joint venture with management consultants McKinsey, intending to ‘fuse social media’ into client companies.

The Guardian’s Datablog has been recognised by the Royal Statistical Society, which runs an annual award for statistical excellence in journalism.

When Microsoft decides to imagine the future, it never fails to impress. Not only do you have some of the smartest people envisioning what’s possible, but they also invest so much into communicating these ideas through sights and sounds which the production value can be compared to most blockbuster sci-fi films.

By Nathan Yau - Jun 3, 2010

It’s fun to imagine the future. Every few months, someone takes a stab with a concept video or a proof of concept prototype, providing a glimpse into human-computer interaction and data visualization in a decade or two. What will it really look like? It’s anyone’s guess. But if people’s imaginations are any indication, the future will be filled of data displays and 3-dimensional holographic objects projected into physical space.
 

Embedded Data

If there’s anything uniform across all the ideas, it’s ubiquity. In the future, computers won’t feel like computers, and data will not just flow alongside the physical world. Instead, data will intertwine with your day-to-day like threads in a fabric.

Most recently, Frog Design, came up with some of their own concepts (which accompanied a fine series of articles on Life in 2020 in Forbes).

In this one a girl sees a jacket that she likes on someone else. She is able to look it up instantly.

Next, a man grabs a meal at his favorite fast food burger joint. A display pops up that tells him that he is fat and needs to exercise more. He feels sad. He later enjoys his burger and fries, accompanied by his American-sized coke.

Finally, in the the third, a married couple, Andrew Kendel and Jenny Daniels, sit down for a nice cup of coffee. They both feel smug because they have way more friends then Mandy Monroe and Maggie Jones behind them. April, however, who appears to have the same profile as Jenny doesn’t seem to be all that excited to be hanging out with the lesser Mandy.

I kid, I kid. April doesn’t actually mind.

Okay, so your first thought is probably that the world would be a very cluttered space with floating displays on top of everyone’s head. The premise here though is that you’d wear something to augment your vision or simply see the data on your mobile. The main points are more about linked data, virtually unlimited resources, and data embedded in the everyday. People aren’t going to actually walk around with projectors in their bags.

We’ve seen this before.

Microsoft has a boatload of concept videos for what they’ve envisioned for 2019. Here’s the main one. The rest are variations of this, but for specific application areas like construction or medicine.

Freeband Communication envisions an embedded life too - with a dash of drama.

Designer Timo Arnall has something similar in mind for maps in his concept video, Map/Territory. Somehow the map displays itself to scale, below your feet.

Fantasy World

How about taking it all the way to the extreme, where, uh, no man has gone before?

Create an entire world virtually with holograms you can manipulate, but make it real in your mind - and someone else’s.

Of course we can’t talk future data interactions without making a reference to the Minority Report scene. John Anderson sifts through images and facts as if he were conducting an orchestra.

We saw something similar in Iron Man 2, but kicked up a notch. Tony Stark creates a completely new element. Fancy that. There were 3-dimensional projections flying every which way and things imploding and exploding with a clap of a hand.

Let’s not forget that just about every surface of his house and lab was interactive and functioned as a single unit.

Looking Ahead

Crazy stuff. Are these ideas really that far fetched though? Crazy as they may sound, sometimes it’s funny how life likes to mimic the imagination. We already have visual related-image search, social networks are finding their way into the real world, and data collection has gotten super easy with advancing mobile technology. Skinput takes the interface out of the device, and uses your body as the input surface. We’ve even got Minority Report style interfaces popping up.

So how much of these concepts will actually come to fruition in the next decade? Like I said, it’s anyone’s guess. Whatever it is, it’s going to be fun.

What do you see in the year 2020? Let your imagination run wild.

crookedindifference:

According to a 2006 survey conducted by Pew Research, 40 percent of Americans between the ages of 26 and 40 have at least one tattoo; 36 percent of those age 18-25 report having a tattoo. Only 1 in 10 people older people have a tattoo.

Even if you’re using an analytics solution like Chartbeat or Google Analytics (), you’re probably leaving money on the table in the form of ungathered data that could lead to opportunities to engage with, cater to, and monetize users.

If you’re looking for better engagement and deeper insights, the following are five types of actionable data and ways you can get it from your audience.

  Collection of Social Network Analysis Tools and Libraries.

  Always handy.

  Who knows when you might need one.

This post kicks off a multi-post miniseries on the topic of influencers: how to find them, engage them, and collaborate with them in word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing programs.

Influence marketing today is in a state of experimentation that scientists call the pre-paradigm phase or exploratory phase. During this phase, everyone is trying different approaches based on experience. There are incomplete theories about why some approaches work and others fail, but there is no underlying fundamental principle that explains everything. My approach in this series is to see if we can gain a deeper understanding by analyzing the process of influence from a data analytics perspective, using a simplified model of social media influence.