Darwin Discovery Engine Blog

The Power of Visualization and Real Time Data

 Last week I attended the the Webtrends Engage event in New Orleans. I want to share with you one session that relates to one of our concerns at Darwin. Ben Cerveny of Stamen Design spoke on Real Time Data and the Power of Visualization.  before I go there I want to share an image that I felt was a greta visualization. The city is very proud of their New Orleans Saints football team that is going to the Super Bowl for the first time in the 43 years of playing here. On the left is an American flag Saints style that I saw here in the Uptown area. While the colors are not exactly the same as this blog, they do go with it. 

Ben labeled his talk, Shapes in the Cloud. His company is a boutique design firm in San Franciso. He talked about how data visualization affects both the front and back end of data. Webtrends also actively supports innovation on both ends.

Ben went through a series of their projects, beginning with a virtual town hall for Moveon.org. in 2004.  Moveon.org wanted to invite guests to talk about the political issues in the 2004 US election. They wanted some visualization to support the audio on the web site. You logged into the site with your zip code. You would then see a map and see the participants by location. This gave you a sense of the audience. It was dynamic so you could bee to progression of attendees and see the growth.

Next, you could see results from polls related to the speakers. The data would change as the results rolled in, again in the map format so you continued to get a sense of community. This showed the dynamic aspects of data as a medium. Ben said that data can be a mirror and people and communities can use to see more about themselves.

Next, Ben talked about their work with Digg In 2006.  Digg is one of the top news aggregation sites. Ben’s firm formed a partner ship with Digg, to create a site called Digg Labs to show visualizations and the dynamics of interactions.  He showed a display where stories and their supporters are displayed. You can see the evolution of voting patterns. If people vote for more than one story you can see the connections. This visualization is still playing at digglabs.com. These and other visualization show the dynamics of the Digg community and the evolution of stories. You see the explosion of votes as popular stories break. Stack is another digglabs visualization that shows the pattern of story votes over time.

Ben’s firm also did a visual hurricane tracker for MSNBC. The visualization simultaneously shows the effects over time, as well as the present status.  You can drill down from the high level view to get details. There is the live version and the historic version. Both are still live at MSNBC.com./hurricanetracker  You can parse the data to see only level 5 hurricanes, for example. You can patterns of movement.

Trulia Hindsight shows historic views of home construction. Trulia has access to data from tax assessments in the US. You can se the patterns of development as a city emerges. He showed parts of San Francisco from 1848 to 2003 so you can see how the city grew. The process of creating the visualization helped the Trulia data people to better understand what was within their data.

Ben next talked about Crimespotting in Oakland. This project shows where crimes occur in Oakland. They took data form the city web site and then rebuild how it is visualized to make it more understandable. They did this as test case. You can see when crimes happen, as well as where. You can parse the data by different dimensions such as time of day.

The last project is SFMOMA ArtScope to provide immersive art browsing. For the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, they put the entire catalog from the museum into a site. They made it into a slippery map format (like Google Maps) that allows you to move over images. You can see paintings as they were acquired over time. You can the patterns of collection. I wish the Boston MFA had this application.

Ben and his firm do some very creative work that does demonstrate the power of good visualizations. 

CI Expresso - Interview: Thierry Hubert, Darwin Ecosystem : « Vers un dialogue communautaire étendu »

Interview by CI Expresso in french on customer intelligence loyalty through on-line communities.  

Webcom 09 - The Misplaced Fear of the Mainstream Media

Permeating the recent Webcom 2009 event was the discomfort and fear of mainstream media losing ground to the rise of social media.

The simple reality that information consumption is migrating into a Web dialogue leaves the mainstream media having to compete with what they label as unverified content, and thus accordingly, untrustworthy information. Again, a major perception shift from an industry that has a difficult time distinguishing between unverified written expressions and the wisdom of crowd. I often heard from many traditional media people attending such comments as: “How can people consume such rubbish and unverifiable comments?” “We are dedicated to verifying and delivering quality content that is far more reliable!”.

Formal content providers truly believe that without their controlled content people will have a distorted view of what matters and believe opinions over facts. From their perspective they are absolutely right! If people accept social media information as validated truth, we would have... well, isn’t this what we already have? The simple fact that opinions and discussions are transposed from the oral to the written form does not mean that it changes much regarding the risk of people being misinformed. People distort, fabricate and adopt their own points of view according to their social networks, whether it be physical or the Web. The battle is not one of formal versus informal, but one where formal content providers need to listen and engage in the dialogue.

I was also amused when I heard that mainstream media and large companies were questioning the value of social media and its content. These companies and traditional media spend fortunes on market trend analysis with voodoo-like rearview mirror reporting that only serves to give them an impact appreciation for what they did in order to improve the next campaign. The amusing part is that they have traditionally done this to measure opinions and perceptions to best attract customers, yet today they are worried about the volume of content created by the same people they have been trying to mind-probe through inference investigation. Can someone pinch me here?

The perception that has to change is not the one of the people (it is only a transposition for them), it is the one of the media companies who are far more feudal than the people, as they fear a loss of power. I believe that Thomas W. Malone’s 2004 The Future of Work a great tome on the transformation of business, is more meaningful today in the light of the traditional media companies’ challenge. But are traditional media companies capable of distributed deliberation and content creation with the emerging wisdom of crowds?

The ability to have a real-time written communication has changed the concept of readers and audiences. It is now a dialogue! And from that basis the media industry is transformed forever. Traditional media needs to rethink its relationship with its customers (yes customers as they are no longer passive). They need to focus on their core value of reliable information and take it to a new level that will preserve their integrity as their assumptions regarding the information life-cycles and distribution are changing. Some will understand that their business operating processes are the enemy and that they must create new ones. 

Many media companies are becoming consumed by finding ways to become social destinations themselves than thinking about their core business value proposition and processes. These companies are taking the risk of becoming followers in the media revolution instead of becoming the leaders and champions of valued and verified information. In my opinion they are making a mistake as they are driven by following to catch-up instead of innovating and managing their own transformation.  

See the post by my colleague Bill Ives that appeared here this Monday on What killed the Rocky Mountain News for an example of a mainstream news company that did not successfully handle the rise of social media. In this session the former Editor, John Temple, said that newspapers now need to spend more time on innovation and not simply work on trying to get more revenue for online versions of what they have always done. 

Post script: The Seattle Times recently took the innovative step of inviting editors from some neighborhood blogs to question mayoral candidates for a town hall-style debate organized by the newspaper and its news partner, KING-TV. Here is a good example of creative use of soical media with traditional media. 

Taking the Pulse 2.0 of Success

Organizations of every size believe their vision for the future must lead their actions to be realized. To ensure that actions are aimed towards that end, the challenge of the executive team is about gaining the trust, leading the inspiration and ensuring that the vision will be adopted and acted upon. An experienced executive team will also ensure that the organization’s stakeholders express their vision and share its ownership. This provides for a better feasibility assessment and execution commitment.

Maintaining and reinventing a vision is a highly iterative process that shapes future outcomes. This process can be most effective when observing measurable results as early as possible in the vision’s life cycle. The results are often used to measure if the vision was correct or requires improvement. Nowadays this form of measurement provides leadership with a rear-view mirror decision-making perspective. In fact, when an organization measures sales, it is the outcome of coordinated collaborative efforts that have often occurred months before becoming a key indicator of success. 

Today management needs to have real-time visibility on the company’s vision adoption and actions that lead to the measured result. With the emergence of Web 2.0 collaboration tools, many teams and knowledge workers use chat rooms, blogs, wikis and other means to coordinate their activities and implement best practices aimed at reaching their common goal. Unfortunately, this information and knowledge is rarely observed as a measurement of the pulse of what is going on day-to-day. These tools remain segregated, ambiguous and lead to perishable or ignored content simply because they are too heterogeneous to provide measurements. Yet employees use them for deliberation, decision buy-in, delegation and strategic purposes.

We have a platform that provides an overview of pulse of different initiatives across the enterprise’s Web 2.0 collaboration.