When the first immersive 3D games came out, I asked a programmer if he knew of anyone who had used that technology to create a Virtual Ancient Rome or Virtual Ancient Athens. I loved the idea of walking around in a place whose current face was changed out of all recognition from its golden age. He shook his head. Creating virtual worlds was way too time consuming and required too much specialist knowledge and so was too expensive. A virtual Rome wouldn't create the profit that Doom did.
Fast forward a decade and the programming necessary becomes easier to do and the number of people who know how to do it have increased substantially. The costs involved in creating a virtual world have decreased at the same time that academic and scholarly institutions have become much more willing to invest in it.
While in New York earlier this month, I attended New York University's annual ITP Spring Show. ITP is a graduate program for communications studies and the Spring Show is a chance for students to showcase their interactive projects. I saw everything from Matrix-like interactive squiddies, to a woman on stilts powered by an iPhone app, to a paint brush that made music.
Probably the most impressive thing I saw, though, was a media project by a student named Zoe Fraade-Blanar. Current: A News Project is a prototype meme tracker using data visualization.
ReadWriteWeb and Tableau are pleased to announce the winner of the Tableau User Generated Graph Contest: Rina Bongsu-Petersen and her interpretation of U.S. obesity data (see below).
The judges - Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb's co-editor; Stephen Few, a leading data visualization expert; and Jock Mackinlay, Tableau's director of visual analysis - found the entry to be not just a powerful tool, but also an indicator of how easy-to-use data visualization is changing the world.
Looking for a job? You're probably about to find one. By the year 2018 there will be 1.4 million job openings for so-called "computer specialists" - that's everyone from developers to database administrators - according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
If you never saw Minority Report, then we can just tell you - when Tom Cruise uses a "computer" he looks more like a conductor of an orchestra, or maybe a DJ, than your average typist. As he browses through files, he swoops his arm dramatically in the air. He forcefully pushes useless information out of the way and manipulates video with swoops and twists of invisible dials.
If you're anything like us, all you thought was "I can't wait to play with that." Well, your time is coming soon.
If all your interests and skills were reduced to a scannable set of tags and thumbnails, what would your ego look like?
That's the question startup YouTego attempts to answer with its Web-based app that asks users to spend a few minutes in navel-gazing self-definition to create a snappy page of terms and related images. It's simple, social and actually quite fun once you get the hang of it.
Could a more eye-catching approach to syndication make RSS more accesible to mainstream users outside the geekosphere? Two new websites have just launched that rely on such a strategy gaining traction.
Spectives and Readfresh are the sites in question, and both offer thumbnail images and a limited amount of text. Readfresh monitors sites and brings the most recently updated sites to the top of a user's page, allowing users to see what's new at a glance. Spectives, on the other hand, gives users "one page, a lot of pictures, updating constantly" from RSS feeds and websites. Read on for a side-by-side comparison and our assessment.
Like Santa Claus, Infegy's Social Radar knows when you've been bad or good. The enterprise solution collects millions of articles and conversations from traditional media, social networks and blogs and captures them in a brand snapshot. The tool has been crawling millions of pages since January 2007 and can compile a dossier-style picture of your company's successes and flaws. In a recent interview, Infegy President Adam Coomes showed ReadWriteWeb the power of his product through an animated look at the Domino's Pizza disaster.
Hot new RSS reader LazyFeed just announced that it intends to implement support for RSSCloud, the real-time element in RSS that WordPress turned on for millions of blogs today. Perhaps already more hip to the real time web than any other RSS aggregator on the market, LazyFeed is a very logical place to see RSSCloud in action.
LazyFeed is a service that tracks blog posts by topic and notifies users in real time when new posts of interest from across the web are available. You don't subscribe to RSS feeds in LazyFeed; users select topics manually or the service can suggest topics based on the interests you've already exhibited in your Twitter, Delicious or other social media account. Now the site will serve up posts from WordPress blogs in real time.
Italian PR professional and former Microsoft Italy marketer Vincenzo Cosenza sent us an interesting visualization today. Below is a map of the world, showing the most popular social networks by country. The map was built using Alexa and Google Trends for Website traffic data in June 2009 and we think it shows some interesting trends. After all, our world is becoming smaller and it's good to know what services our friends on the other side of the globe are using to connect with each other.
