Buzz Out Loud Podcast

Episode 871

Chrome breaks outta beta
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10120965-2.html

Nintendo Wii outsells Xbox 360 more than two-to-one
http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/peripherals/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212500018&subSection=All+Stories

Sony’s PS3 A sinking ship: Sales plummet (SNE)
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/12/sonys-ps3-a-sinking-ship-sales-plummet-sne

Acer Aspire One goes official on AT&T’s 3G network
http://www.engadget.com/2008/12/11/acer-aspire-one-goes-official-on-atandts-3g-network/
http://www.jkontherun.com/2008/12/acers-99-netboo.html

Android susceptible to apps that turn on roaming
http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08%2F12%2F12%2F149242
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/11/g1_roaming/

Cellphone jammer crammed into key fob, ends texting / talking while driving (thanks, Greg and Michael and Jordan et al)
http://www.engadget.com/2008/12/12/cellphone-jammer-crammed-into-key-fob-ends-texting-talking-wh/

FCC Commissioner blames World of Warcraft addiction for huge college dropout rate
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/12/fcc-blames-college-dropout-rate-on-world-of-warcraft-addiction

Five PC power myths debunked
http://weblog.infoworld.com/sustainableit/archives/2008/12/pc_power_manage_1.html

NFL launches “Game Rewind”, every game on-demand in HD with no commercials
http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2008/12/nfl-launches-game-rewind-every-game-ondemand-in-hd-with-no-commercials.html

Russian hopes to cash in on
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7778767.stm

Puppy Cam: Viewed 15 million times, for 773 years
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/12/puppy-cam-viewed-15-million-times-for-773-years

E-mail
Hello Buzz crew,

Since you talk about it SO MUCH, yesterday I finally signed up for Twitter . And looking for CNET celebrities to follow, I went to see who does Rafe Needleman follow. Guess who. Yahoo’s top search term for 2008. That’s right, Rafe Needleman follows Britney Spears on Twitter. I just can’t imagine Rafe listening to "Baby One More Time," so, may I ask why?

Love the show.

Regards,
Bernardo

**********

Have you all been following the USPS outages? I am 2 episodes behind (been to cold and rainy to walk my dog), so apologize if you've mentioned.

http://www.usps.com/homearea/onlinesysteminterruptions.htm

Seems it is affecting small business, too:

http://cbs3.com/local/Loca.l.Business.2.884808.html

LTS,

/John in Fairfax

AAAAAND its fixed.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10121982-38.html

**********

Hey JaMoTo / buzz crew +1,

I think the whole ‘In The Wild’ bingo game is great, and I’m just
waiting for someone to run up and snap a picture of me, being that I
bring my Kindle everywhere and I am a ‘Kindle in the wild’.

Anyhow, after yesterday’s show where Molly mentioned a Retro Edition
of BOL Bingo would be fun, I decided she shouldn’t be denied and I
made one up and attached it below. I’ve also uploaded it to my Flickr
account so it can be shared with the citizens of Buzz Town. It can be
found here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/98865482@N00/3102895508/
I hope you enjoy it. Love the show!

-Aaron the Delorean driver (and Kindle in the wild)
New York

**********

Hi guys!

In the last show, Molly made a comment about how the ustream
video-page “isn’t an RSS-feed”. Well, now it is! I used Yahoo! Pipes
to create an RSS-feed of your live video shows. I wrote it up in the
forums, at:

http://forums.cnet.com/5208-10152_102-0.html?forumID=97&threadID=320004&messageID=2926270&tag=forums06;forum-threads

Hope you like it!

–Oskar

**********

Ahoy Buzz Brigade,
Regarding episode 870 on LTE, y’all made a few missteps about the facts.

First off, the commonly held misconception is that LTE has anything to do with GSM. This is similar to the misconception that WCDMA, more commonly known as the tech behind UMTS, HSDPA, HSUPA, HSPA and HSPA+, has anything to do with GSM. While the tech that preceded GSM for AT&T, TDMA, was the technical precursor to the speaker-buzzing wonder iPhone fans know and love, HSPA (the 3G in the iPhone 3G, etc.) is only GSM’s successor because that was the preferred upgrade path of most GSM carriers. LTE is OFDM-based (as is 802.11g WiFi and…gasp…WiMAX in higher-speed modulations), and is thus another completely different underlying technology with no built-in backward compatibility to either GSM or HSPA. However, the majority of GSM carriers across the world, plus many CDMA carriers (Verizon being one of them) have chosen LTE as their upgrade path. It’s like saying that Mac OS X is a technical upgrade to OS 9…while the same company is going with the precedent as the successor, OS X is based on BSD/Unix while OS 9 is based on some witch’s brew Apple cooked up eons ago.

To be clear, I’m not bashing LTE, though WiMAX is out in the field now whereas LTE has so far not ventured out of lab doors. But to say either technology is the technical successor to either GSM/HSPA or CDMA (which has a direct 3G upgrade, EvDO) would be flawed. Though the same standards board responsible for GSM and WCDMA also dreamed up LTE (3GPP)…

Second and finally, though tests confirm that LTE, at similar range to WiMAX it seems, can provide link speeds comparable to WiFi, you won’t see speeds like those in the wild for quite awhile. The reason is mostly that of backhaul. To provide 100 Mbps to a subscriber, LTE not only needs a liberal swatch of spectrum (something only ClearWire, the WiMax guys, has), but it needs a tower connected to some serious backhaul. To give you an idea of how serious this backhaul would need to be, think about your local cable company’s node, that serves a few hundred people. If your cable operator is Comcast and you just got a speed upgrade, they can offer a total of 114 Mbps over an entire node on the downstream, and 30 Mbps on the upstream. This would be enough for a single LTE customer to get full-speed access. Then again, AT&T U-Verse and Verizon FiOS have the infrastructure for LTE at the node level, but you’re still looking at more bandwidth than anybody is pushing over copper or cable right now. Of course, if Verizon rolls it out in FiOS areas (WiFiOS anyone?) it’ll work on the backhaul side, but…

…you have the problem of femtocells. Anyone using a femtocell for LTE has their internet connection as the bottleneck for service. You can’t get 100 Mbps over a 6 Mbit cable connection. Of course, if Verizon allowed femtocells to hook directly into customers’ FiOS installs, independent of the 10-50 mbps download and 2-20 mbps upload limits on users’ accounts, that’d work. But that’s about the only solution if they want to actually get the speeds they’re boasting about.

Hope this clears things up and love the show!

Ian (the Colorado college student, iansltx on Twitter)

Episode 866

Listener co-host details: E-mail buzz@cnet.com with your name, phone number, preferred time of day (with time zone). We are shooting for doing the interviews next Monday 3-4 p.m. PST and Wednesday 4-5 PST.

Facebook Connect opens up
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10113604-2.html

So does Google Friend Connect
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10113648-2.html

Koobface’ Virus Attacks Facebook
http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/12/koobface-virus.html
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10113981-83.html

eBay holiday contest overrun by automated scripts, honest users disgruntled
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/04/ebay-holiday-contest-overrun-by-automated-scripts-honest-users-disgruntled/

First NFL game in 3-D fumbles, then recovers
http://news.wired.com/dynamic/stories/N/NFL_3D?SITE=WIRE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2008-12-05-07-43-16

Some Xbox owners see poor-quality Netflix streams
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10113937-93.html

Online reporters now the journalists most often jailed
http://news.slashdot.org/news/08/12/05/0532240.shtml

Martini Life launches as hub for affluent individuals
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10113329-2.html

Obama sports white earbuds, doesn’t rock Zune
http://www.macworld.com/article/137347/obama_ipod.html

Voice Mail
Daniel: beaten to the Netbook girl

E-mail
Hi Buzz Crew:

In episode 863, Jason brought up the notion of having holographic passengers. (For the sake of discussion, let’s ignore the fact we don’t actually have a viable holographic system.) My engineering side kicked in, and I started thinking about the equipment that would have to be added: computers, projectors, power conversion (since there’s no way this thing’s running on 12 V), etc. In short, this is one option that’s not going to fit in a Prius. Maybe an Escalade assuming you were not planning on using the back for anything else. The cost of this thing would be enormous. That said, if one or two holographic passengers qualifies me for the HOV lanes, I’m in.

Craig (in VA just outside DC)

**********

Hey JaMoTo (+1)

With all the talk lately about who watchs ads on the TiVo, I was happy to find a new article circling around the net lately. There is an affliction that is now dubbed “TiVo Guilt”.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/TV/12/02/tivo.guilt/?iref=hpmostpop

Also on the TiVo viewers and how many commercials they watch, I have noticed a strange pattern in my boyfriend’s TiVo habits: When we are watching something live, he gets very indignant that he can’t fastforward the commercials, but when watching something pre-recorded, he promptly forgets we have a TiVo. We’ll make it halfway through the break and he’ll suddenly go “Oh yeah, TiVo!” and begin fastforwarding then, having just watched half the ads. This process will repeat for subsequent breaks. It’s an odd little phenomenon, no?

Love the show!
Amy in cold London, Ontario, Canada

**********

What’s goin’ down, BOL crew?

I know you talked about this a few days ago, but today, my cousin’s macbook-pro collapsed horrendously the other day due to a virus. I didn’t believe it at first because I’ve had an ibook g4 for over three years and I have never had a problem with it. He took it to the local apple store. They said that he should purchase more than one type of virus software, but they didn’t sell any at the apple store.
My cousin had to go to CompUSA to buy clunky and terrible virus protection software that completely harshes the mellow of his computer, increasing its boot time by a considerable amount.

I thought you all might like to hear about this.

Love the show,
Ian the high school student from Milton, Georgia

**********

Who hates Apple and has the money to fund Psystar? The answer should be obvious:

The Beatles.

Think about it.

-Jon
(a.k.a. “TenaciousWii”)

**********

Hi guys,
Go to the kogan website and order the international one. It costs about ?500 ($600). I knew it sounded too good to be true.

Love the show,
Eoghan (Owen) in Ireland.

Rafe and Molly square off over the reuse of air conditioning technology, the fail whale sinks a deal between Facebook and Twitter, Gmail is cracked, and an enterprising astronaut creates the ultimate in must-have space tech: a zero-G coffee cup.

EPISODE 859

Twitter rebuffs a Facebook poke?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10106391-2.html

Gmail exploit may allow attackers to forward e-mail
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10106275-83.html
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/breaking-gmail-security-flaw-more-domains-get-stollen/

EU strikes down French “3 strikes” copyright infringement law
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/23/1952248

Has HavenCo’s data haven shut down?
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/24/1326252

Machine condenses drinking water out of thin air
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/23/1851200

Astronaut invents zero-G coffee cup
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/081124-sts126-zerog-coffee-B.html

NFL demos live 3D broadcasts
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10106431-93.html

Verizon workers fired over Obama records breach
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10106122-94.html

Why Obama should ditch YouTube
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13739_3-10106214-46.html

Have it all: Lunascape, the browser with three engines
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10105896-2.html

VOICE MAIL
Stephan: Does Molly owe Tom $2?

Ed from Maryland: Success!

E-MAIL
Since y’all didn’t cover the Supercomputing conference in Austin last week (a show where “consumer” and “low-end” mean “under $50K a piece”) here’s a quick floor report:

First, the race for the fastest computer in the world. In summary, we won! (We being the Los Alamos Roadrunner team). Oak Ridge’s new Jaguar was the second ever to get a Petaflop/s on the Top500 benchmark, but came up short a mere 46 Teraflops. That margin of victory is larger than the performance of any machine built before 2004. But, Roadrunner still gets more than 3x more Flops per watt than Jaguar.

To Oak Ridge’s credit, they did get the fastest scientific application ever. A 1.3PF, single-precision, run of a superconductivity simulation. More atoms and more detailed force calculations in these models than have ever been simulated. By next year’s SC conference, there should be lots more record breaking simulations coming from the Oak Ridge and Los Alamos monsters.

Also cool, the OpenCL standard is moving along nicely. It’s a library to allow easier use of GPU cores for computation. A useful release should come out sometime in 2009 which ought to make the GPU solutions every booth was hawking more appetizing.

The new Intel and AMD CPU lines were mostly ignored. No one seemed to care at all for Michael Dell’s keynote. Sun is going whole hog into high performance, despite layoffs elsewhere. And, sadly, not much new in networking and storage.

The good news is, despite These Troubled Economic Times, high performance computing seems to be doing ok. The budgets for most labs and research centers are flat or growing slowly, and the vendors are pushing lots of innovation into the space. Plus the t-shirt giveaways were more prolific than they’ve been since the dot-com days…:)

Also, Austin is a very cool town, and The Salt Lick is mighty fine BBQ…I’m still stuffed.

Love the show,
-Mark the supercomputer repairman

I’d just like to point out how amazingly intelligent Charter Communications is in regards to throttling high bandwidth users like myself. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been downloading a lot of, ahem, “Linux ISOs” over the torrents. So it seems that Charter saw fit to slow my download speeds, but rather than throttle my torrents, they throttled everything over HTTP. As a result, I’m still able to download my “Linux ISOs” at over 300KB/sec, but it seems that all HTTP traffic is capped around 30KB/sec. As a result, if I want to watch legitimate commercial or user generated content on sites like Hulu and YouTube, the video is far too jerky and requires too much buffering to be even remotely watchable. As a result, it’s now faster to download shows over torrents than it is to wait for them to load on Hulu. What a great way to discourage piracy, Charter!

-Kyle
Nashville, TN

Hi TMJ+,

I am writing to express my wonderment that I have a Google product that was updated from Beta to a full version in just a couple of months. We are all familiar with the Google habit of leaving most products in Beta for indefinite amounts of time for legal and other sundry reasons.
Well, Picasa 3 is now prime time folks (or ‘guys’ as we say here in OZ). And by the way, it is really cool. And I mean really cool. For example, the Retouch feature is exemplary (see attached collage I created in Picasa of my friend Anna). There is excellent video integration with easy Youtube uploading. There are too many features to list here in such a short space. However, I recommend it to all your listeners for the amateur to semi professional photographer. Google have excelled themselves. Congratulations!

Regards
Louix
Victoria, Australia

Hi buzz crew, I just wanted to write and let you know I found something
interesting when I was at lala.com. After I up loaded my music library to
lala.com, I noticed I was able to play my DRM itunes downloads on lala. I
can’t seem to do this on anything else but an authorized computer. Now I
can do it from my lala cloud. Tell me that isn’t cool! Lala needs a
streaming application for the iphone (and I need to convince my wife to get
an iphone, once iphone gets voice dialing, stereo bluetooth, and cut and
copy)

Well, love the show, and haven’t missed in over 2 years!

Justin

Hey BOL,

After listening to your HDCP rant, I have to vent. I hate HDCP. Just
in every day, in-spec use, it breaks the functionality between my
Toshiba HD-DVD player (it still upscales :*( ) and my Philips 42″ LCD
TV about 30% of the time that I start up a DVD. Essentially what
happens is the movie tries to play, HDCP says no, and/or I get an
epileptic seizure-inducing flashing green screen. I described HDCP to
my friend as a situation where you give both the TV and the player a
loaded gun, you make them both very nervous, and you put them in a
dark, locked room together, and about 30% of the time they start
shooting, killing each other (and preventing me from watching my movie
until I turn them both off and try again).

Love the show! Hate HDCP!

Mike the chip designer in FL

Here’s some good content for you (and another MP3, heh), iPhone nukes. This taken directly from iPhone EULA:

You also agree that you will not use these products for any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture or production of missiles, or nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
I hope I’m not too late before you decide on what to use today.

LTS,
DanielInHell

EPISODE 670

Google Sites: What’s all the fuss?
http://www.news.com/8301-13953_3-9881642-80.html

Under the bonnet of Android
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2008/02/under_the_bonnet_of_android_1.html

Apple: All signs point to a more business friendly iPhone
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8104

Sprint raises stakes in the $99.99 unlimited battle http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9881662-7.html

EU may begin treating ‘Net censorship as a trade barrier http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/ 20080227-eu-may-begin-treating-net-censorship-as-a-trade-barrier.html

Former FBI Agent Calls for a Second Internet
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/27/2310247

MLB Increases Its Chokehold: Starts Its Own Online Usage Restrictions; Following NFL's Lead http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/ 419-mlb-increases-its-chokehold-starts-its-own-online-usage-restrictions-fo/

I know where you lived last summer: a “hair-brained” method for tracking people http://dvice.com/archives/2008/02/i_know_where_yo.php

Plan to teach baby robot to talk
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/devon/7268965.stm

VOICE MAIL

Anonymous
BOL camping trip.

Agent Provacateur Portland
What about the iPhone Firmware update?

Meggy Indiana
Looks back at her life.

E-MAIL

Not about technology at all

Tom, Molly and Jason,

Despite not being about technology at all I have a funny anecdote about listening to your show in the office.

I frequently listen to your show at work, since I have a real office with walls it usually doesn’t cause any problems or disturb anyone when I listen to stuff on real speakers.

In the last six months we hired two new people who sit right outside my office. Turns out during this time they have discussed with each other how surprised they are that I listen to the Howard Stern show so much. But since they are newer they didn’t feel comfortable saying anything until recently.

Thing is, I don’t listen to Howard Stern.

We tested, I played a bit from each of the shows I listen to and they confirmed (from just outside my office door) that when I am listening to Buzz they thought it was Howard. They were doubly sure it was your show when I did the tests because most of the other stuff I listen to that is all talk is from the BBC and, I quote “there aren’t any female voices in those and we thought we heard Howard and Robin…and sometimes there is sort of a yelling voice”. Sorry, Molly, I think they meant your voice.

So, moral of the story, I will listen to podcasts on my iPod or just stick with music.

Cheers,
Nancy

*************************

Property tax on IP

A few things about property tax on intellectual properties.

1) Property tax is levied by the local governments, not the federal governments. The highly abridged version as to why only local governments levy property tax in the 20th/21st century is that the tax is used to fund local services such as fire, police, public education, the “justification” being local people consumes the local services (don’t get me started on feeding the homeless with my property taxes).
Prior to that, it was a wealth tax used to fund wars efforts (because we didn’t have a national income tax until 1916). A wealth tax is basically a tax based on who can afford to pay, and in the old days, land=wealth.

2) Property tax can be levied only on tangible items (real estate and
chattel) because of the concepts of locality (jurisdiction) and determinability (an objective formula). Again, the history is that cows, pigs and ranches are unique (no two pigs are identical), and therefore, easy for the taxing authorities to determine where something is, who has it, how many items there are, and therefore, who can tax it and how much.

Intangible properties, by definition, a) has no locality so it cannot be determined who has jurisdiction to tax it, and b) have no form, and are not unique (one copy of software is identical to another), so there is no determinable formula to value and compute the tax.

Taken to the extreme, when it is “located” in the minds of people, e.g., the formula for Coke(r) are inside Coke’s executives’ heads, how do you know who really “has” it, where is it, and do you tax all the copies–how many copies are there? And when they fly around the country, or drive from one county to another, does each jurisdiction get
a piece of the action? And then how much is it worth–is Coke’s
formula more valuable than say a JaMoTo’s cocktail concoction.

The property tax concept cannot really work on IP. Not that the taxing authorities won’t try to invent something–please don’t give them more ideas.

Dickson Leung

********************************

Problem with taxed copyright

Hey TMJ

In my (small) life outside of technology, I’m also a magician, and from there I can see some interesting problems with taxing copyright. The problem comes in the article’s assumption that over time the demand for the intellectual property decreases while some value remains…

Many magicians seeking to make money on effects they’ve created, aside from performance, generally try to sell those tricks to other magicians. Often, in order to increase the price or to retain enough exclusivity so that the creator can continue to regularly perform the trick (or, simply because it ends up being loved by the magic community much more than expected), a limited number of the explanations are sold, or they are sold for a limited amount of time.

Here’s the problem with taxes: while the method behind the trick cannot be copyrighted/protected per se (it is, after all, only an idea), the media on which the explanation is conveyed can be copyrighted. If a magician wanted to release his effect in that limited way, to balance profits against exclusivity, he or she would then be forced to maintain the taxes on that copyright, eating away at whatever profits he/she sought to gain in the first place. In this case, the material is specifically being kept in copyright and sold limitedly in order to increase the demand, negating an essential part of the premise of the article you cited during BOL. While magic is first example I thought of, I’m pretty sure that such a tactic would apply to other businesses.

Perhaps the best way to do this would be to tax copyright holders on a graduated basis. Those only holding a few copyrights would be exempt from taxes at all, those with an abundance of copyrights (which would include the opposite magicians who try to sell as many tricks as possible) would be taxed based on the number of copyrights they have.

Oh, and a totally random thought… I may be crazy but your show length may not be so indeterminate. Anyone else notice BOL increasing in length while Molly was on vacation (getting close to 50 minutes an episode) and then returning to normal with her return? Perhaps semi-indeterminate? Just a thought.

Bennett

***************************

A little more on IE8 (developer views)

Hey Buzz Crew,

Just thought I’d add a little more perspective to the IE 8 conversation. Back in January when this whole thing came out Daringfireball.net did a nice commentary on a lot of developers statements.

A little comment from John Resig (http://ejohn.org/blog/meta-madness/) (via DaringFireball) who works from Mozilla. He says two important things.

“What seems to have slipped past the Microsoft Task Force of WaSP (or maybe it didn’t and they’re just playing coy) is that by implementing this specific feature in any other browser immediately either: A) Reduces its market size of viable web pages that will upgrade to new versions of the browser or B) Forces new versions of the browser to bloat, including backwards support for old-style rendering.

The fundamental issue is that Safari, Firefox, and Opera will all be harmed by attempting to implement this. Anne, from Opera, completely agrees.”

so apparently while this might be good for IE its bad for other browsers.

Here are some more links:

A list of responses and reactions (mainly developers): http://www.digital-web.com/news/2008/01/IE8_Version_Targeting_causes_quite_a_stir

Tim

********************************

Me, me, I thought of it first

Well, sort of. I wrote an extensive article about the intellectual property metaphor last year, can’t believe you missed it. Well, it was in a Czech literary magazine (http://literarky.cz/?p=clanek&id=4767), but still! What I wrote about was that metaphors are commonly exploited up to a point by certain interests but that they can be picked up by others and brought to conclusions that will challenge the whole metaphor. For instance, with intellectual property the advocates of ’song recording’ as property never want to hear of consequences that owning property means. E.g. they never acknowledge that their property may intrude on mine such as hearing a song I don’t like while walking down the street. Or that they rely on the common good to promote their materials, such as public airwaves or just conversations people have about a song or a book. They particularly can’t expect laws to protect their property at the expense of other rights. I compared it to the ‘right of way’ laws in England. I didn’t think about ‘property taxes’, partly because in Czech there is a different word for ‘property’ used in the phrases ‘intellectual property’ (vlastnictvi) and ‘property tax’ (nemovitost).

More nitty gritty on metaphors and frames in public discourse on my blog: http://hermeneuticheretic.net.

Dominik

PS: I'm not sure I love the show (we Czechs are much more judicious in our use of the word), but I’m pretty close to being in love with Molly!

*****************************

Le Monde social networks map

Hi,

I heard your comments on the show about the Le Monde social network map, and would like to point out a richer version of the social networking map presented by Le Monde at this site http://csserver.ucd.ie/~mfarrugia/

Apart from showing the data on a map there are two other views of the same data. There’s an academic twist to these visualizations and the purpose of this is to try and compare the popularity of simple displays like the map, with more data rich visualizations that don’t look so pretty. If you can help popularize this site to have more people try out the different displays I’d be very grateful.

The data is presented using the many eyes site (http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/) which allows you to upload any data and visualize it. The site itself is worthy of mention in the context of collaborative visualizations at internet scale. The data used for the visualizations is also freely available and anybody can create his/her own visualization and analysis of the data.

Cheers,

Mike
UCD Ireland