Data & Stuff // Neil Houston

Spotted: December 14th – December 30th:

• UK UX Freelancers Rate Review 2010 – The Inaugural Report | disambiguity –
• The Political Power of Social Media | Foreign Affairs – Clay Shirky on The Political Power of Social Media – Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change
• http://mashable.com/2010/12/13/facebook-members-visualization/ – Facebook Intern Paul Butler was interested in the locations of friendships, so he decided to create a visualization of Facebook connections around the globe. How local are our friends? Where are the highest concentration of friendships? How do political and geological boundaries affect them?

Spotted: May 3rd – May 5th:

• Google – General Elections 2010 – From Google, some good coverage of UK websites (Openly Local etc). Britain is going to the polls, and the internet is a great resource to help you make your decision. Quickly find out your MP and candidates below, with links to their blogs and Twitter pages. Then explore further, with fun and interesting election sites from around the web.
• Magazine Preview – The Data-Driven Life – NYTimes.com – An interesting look at people who track their life in great detail.
• About – trst.me – trst.me measures user reputation in a way far more robust than counting the number of followers. The basic idea is to look at how many people interact with you and give you their attention, weighted by how many people interact and pay attention to them
• Eddy – Stame Design – Eddy is a media aggregation platform built for the public display of up-to-the-minute activity on realtime services like Twitter. It was used by Stamen to curate the NBC Olympic coverage, pretty interesting.
• What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News Media? – WWW’10 – Research into Twitter, based off crawling the user network and looking at relationships. Touching on the thoughts of influence.