On missing the end of the Tour de France.

Sadly, I missed the end of the Tour de France as our holiday cottage had limited tv reception, no internet, and no mobile phone reception.

We picked it that way honest.

Fortunately Big Picture helped me catch up.

It's what the internet is for!

On Bras!

Forgive me but I have noticed that bras have been in the news this week!

First I read of Abbie Hawkins who discovered a bat in her bra, after wearing it for five hours!

Then I read of a facebook group called Busts 4 Justice!

I think I should join.

It seems that in Marks and Spencer DD bras are more expensive than bras for smaller busts.
An unfair tax on large busts says the founder of Busts for Justice.

M and S say larger bras require more material so are more expensive, maybe so, but why doesn't that logic apply to all articles of clothing?

Those of you interested in bras, might find this place of use.
It's a shop with virtual models to help the male of the species buy underwear for his loved one!

It's what the internet was invented for!

On "Big is Best"

Although it has been celebrated in many other places I have to point towards the new visual blog to be found on the boston.com site.

Called The Big Picture, it is truly truly brilliant.

Created by a genius called Alan Taylor, it provides really high quality large (990px) photographs, with minimal textual descriptions.

It is an awesome piece of work.

Go and look!

On Driving with Google....

Well, look at this, came across it via Gizmodo

It's a driving simulator, sort of, powered by Google maps.

It's a shame that it doesn't notice when you leave the road or crash into things but wow it's a lot of fun!

Four types of vehicle, three types of map, simple controls,indicators and the whole world to play with!

On the Biggest Hoax Drawing in the World

On the sublimely wonderful Strange Maps I came across this story.

A Swedish artist drew a self portrait on the map of the world, by using a GPS device, a suitcase, an airline and as it has since been revealed a sense of humour.

Writing on the project website the artist states

“My pen was a briefcase containing the GPS device, being sent around
the world. The paths the briefcase took around the globe became the
strokes of the drawing.” The resulting drawing’s dimensions are
40,076,592 by 40,009,153 meters – which are about the dimensions of the
Earth’s surface, if it could be rolled out as a canvas."

The website carries a mass of information, the finished drawing, youtube videos of the design process, pictures of the suitcase, travel instructions, delivery notes and finally four words written in red "This is a fictional work"

I'll own up, for a while I was fooled, and I should have known better!

Remember, not everything you read on the Internet is true, no matter how much we wish it was.

Welsh Digital Divide?

The BBC continues to work hard to integrate its mainstream media transmissions with those of us that inhabit the web. There is doubt that their researchers, producers and managers are working hard to drag us into the connected twenty first century.

This morning on the Internet Blog, Max Gadney points us at the visualisation of comments from BBC News' Have Your Say. I've not watched any of the programs, but the visualisation tool on the top right hand side of the series page is superb.

I love the way the data is presented, I love the way it's colour coded and the way it moves.
It's almost impossible to look at the graphic without clicking, exploring and digging deeper.
If I have a criticism, it's shame that the key and FAQs sometimes obscures part of the display.

Max expresses a preference for exploring the Emotions displayed by the commenters but my attention was drawn to the "Regional Display"




Can someone tell me why are their so few comments from Wales?

Could be that we in Wales are not interested in the issues presented in the program?

Does the obvious lack of comments reflect in some way the "digital divide" and reveal something about the way that the Internet is used in Wales?

Today is BBC News School Report day.

This is another example of the BBC making every effort to not only engage with it's viewers but to give "12 and 13 year olds from UK schools the chance to make their own video, audio or text based news at school and broadcast it for real"

Today "schools around the country will take part in a News Day, simultaneously creating news reports and publishing them on their school websites, to which the BBC aims to link."

A quick glance at the School Report location map shows only eight participating schools in Wales, (five of which are I believe schools where teaching is undertaken through the medium of Welsh). Not one school in Cardiff seems to be taking part!

Can someone tell me why are their so few participants from Wales?

Could be that the majority of schools in Wales are not interested in providing pupils with the opportunity to speak to a wider audience through mainstream media and the internet?

Does the obvious lack of participants reflect in some way another "digital divide" revealing something about the way that the Internet is used / taught in Wales?

How do you say Digital Divide in Welsh?

On Facebook Statistics

Here's an interesting web site / company.

Adonomics an open analytics and advertising platform for Facebook
(Note, they state that their site is in no way affiliated with Facebook)

It's well worth going to explore this site which contains a weath of statistics and information about applications in Facebook.

Their leaderboard shows the total (world wide) numbers of users of particular facebook apps. The board shows the total number of installs per application, the number of active users of an application and the percentage of active users.

Their charts page shows a top 25 list of facebook application companies, clicking on the company name provides a list of applications and a to show daily active users graphed over time.
A superficial examination of random graphs reveals that many of these apps have declining user numbers.
Go see for yourself.

Adonomics offer their services to application developers, and provide a Marketplace for application sellers.

Those of us who are curious about Facebook, its users and its applications can find much to explore here.

The Social Media Starfish

Robert Scoble created the Social Media starfish, Darren Barefoot improved on it.

It covers most of the social bases, but is already out of date.

By the time some of us adopt an application the rest of the world has moved on.
By the time established institutions adopt an application the rest of the world has moved on.

How are we to keep up?

On the "social graph"

During the last couple of months as I have been observing the rise and fall of social networks on the web I have noticed the increasing use of the phrase "social graph".

I think that the popularity of the phrase can be traced to a talk by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.

"Zuckerberg attributed the power of Facebook to the “social graph, ” the network of connections and relationships between people on the service. He said, “It’s the reason Facebook works.”

“Its changing the way the world works,” he said, pushing information out faster than any big company can. “As Facebook adds more and more people with more and more connections it continues growing and becomes more useful at a faster rate. We are going to use it spread information through the social graph.” The net effect of the social graph is that groups and application can achieve exponential growth, he said."

Since then many authorities, bloggers, software houses and academics have all started to use the phrase. If I am honest in my reading I have found use of the phrase confusing. In my mind a graph is usually a visual representation of some mathematical data and a social graph is a representation of a social network; the sort of things student teachers were asked to provide on teaching practice to illustrate classroom relationships.

Why, then when we read about social networks (as might be found in Facebook, Ellg, Ning, Bebo et al) do we read of social graphs? It doesn't make sense.


What a joy it was to discover this evening that Dave Winer thinks the same as me!

On Solar power at the Googleplex

Google have fitted solar panels on the rooftops of eight of their buildings and two of their car ports at the Googleplex

According to Google, this installation

is projected to produce enough electricity for approximately 1,000 California homes or 30% of Google's peak electricity demand in our solar powered buildings at our Mountain View, CA headquarters.

As befits a company that guides us through digital space, Google has made a serious commitment to solar energy production.
Monitor their day to day production of electricity here.

I wonder how many coffee makers there are in the Googleplex?

On "the Future"

Donald Clark pointed me in the direction of Blaise Aguera y Arcas' talk at the recent TED conference.

It's less than eight minutes long, watch out for Bleak House, The Guardian and Notre Dame.

Watch it and wonder.
It's the future.

The Photosynth technology mentioned in the talk can be found at Microsoft Live Labs.


Reading Data Mining: Text Mining: Visualisation and Social Media I see that the BBC has linked with Microsoft Labs to trial the photsynth technology with images of buildings from the TV series How We Built Britain (requires software download, doesn't work with Macs).

I suspect it provides Google Earth with food for thought.

On the State of the Blogosphere

David Sifry has written another quarterly report on the State of the Live Web, with this change of title Technorati indicate that their work now includes all sorts of social media.

As ever it makes for interesting reading. The report is full of fascinating statistics.
Right now Technorati is tracking 70 million blogs, with 120,000 being created every day. No matter how you think about it that is an extraordinary figure.

I struggle as I am sure many do with visualising large numbers
Here's a page that shows one million dots, and here's a clock that counts out the seconds in a day.
Does that help you contemplate 70 million blogs?

Sifry notes that the rate of doubling of the blogosphere has slowed; and interestingly that the rate of posts created each day has also slowed. The report also suggests that "a significant number of people who are blogging are doing it during work hours."

I was also interested in the report comments about the adoption of tags. The number of people using tags is growing fast, by February 2007 35% of all posts tracked by Technorati used tags, with about 2.5 million blogs posting at least one tagged post.

I still can't but help wonder about dead, non active , abandoned or neglected blogs.
There must be many blogs just sitting out there in cyberspace, I presume that Technorati still counts them.

Those of you interested in the state of the UK blogosphere might be interested in this list at Modern Life, to my shame I don't read any of them regularly except for plasticbag.org.

I shall check them out over the next couple of days!

On the Using of Parachutes!

Here is a truly masterful piece of academic writing that for some reason I came across earlier today.
From the title, right through to the conclusions there is much for us to learn here.
It doesn't matter which academic discipline you follow, read this paper from the BMJ.

Although the article at first glance appears flippant there is a serious message here about the use of evidence based research.

As I read the paper my eye was drawn to an entry in the side bar of the BMJ site, offering a view of the citation map. I've not seen one of these before. Its a neat idea.

This little video (from glumbert) might help you appreciate the difficulties faced by researchers in the field of parachute development and the relative uselessness of gps.