Max Kiesler - Web Design, SOMA San Francisco

Walk2Web is a new way to explore web sites from a specified starting point. You type in a starting point-like http://www.blogschmog.net-and you see a page with a screenshot sample of the site and the first two levels of a search network, with sites as nodes. There are no more than six at a time, split between incoming and outgoing links with options to display more in either direction. The network grows as you explore, allowing you to make use of some simple directional tools to navigate the part of the World Wide Web you are manually crawling.

The Flight Patterns visualizations are the result of experiments leading to the project Celestial Mechanics by Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne. FAA data was parsed and plotted using the Processing programming environment. New data and an improved interpolation algorithm has led to revised depictions of air traffic over the U.S. and Canada. FAA data was parsed and plotted using the Processing programming environment, and the frames were composited with Adobe After Effects and/or Maya.

"clickdensity is not another statistics or web analytics tool - instead it allows you to analyse the user experience and identify usability and information architecture issues that would have been impossible to identify without it. The clickdensity heat map shows at a glance the relative popularity of components on your pages. Getting similar data from standard web analytics tools can be impossible, or at best complex and time consuming. The visual quality of clickdensity reports makes them ideal for presentation to non-technical audiences. When your marketing department asks for a report on the benefits of a recent change you've made, what could be better than to show them before and after heat maps?" There is a free trial, unfortunately, it is a paid service.

I've looked at many AJAX and Javascript calendar applications over the last few years, and I find MooMonth to be one of the best downloadable versions I've seen. MooMonth is a full calendar application written in javascript. Heavily configurable and customizable. It features smooth sexy transitions between different views. Still in alpha stages though, it will be several weeks before ready to be tested in production. As an added bonus, MooMonth is available under the CC-GNU LGPL license. So your free to download an use however you like.

"The popularity map shows snapshots of current top artist and album charts by geographical location. The Flash-based interactive map works using data from the Gracenote Media Database and shows the latest artist and album lookups in states, regions, countries, and continents around the world." I like exploring this site as a way to see what the most popular types of music are in different countries. For example, look at the difference in musical tastes between California and Norway. Fun site.

The new "Incident Report & Analysis Tool created by UniversalMind is a great example of how data visualizations can affect our lives. I live in the SOMA district in downtown San Francisco and if this tool was live I could see all of the crimes, incoming calls, and live video feeds from all of the police officers in the city. While this visualization is just a prototype at this point you can instantly see the benefits. Every major city should implement this technology now to give it's citizens a real-time view of crime in their city.

This site converts bitmap images to vector art - it's an online auto-tracer. Just upload your image and they will vectorize it for you. Vector art is useful because it allows you to scale an image without making it blurry or pixelated. Vectorization (aka tracing) is the process of converting a raster image to a vector image. Raster images are pixel-based, whereas vector images are represented by geometric shapes such as lines, circles and curves. The site is currently tuned for tracing logos and photos.

Zooming is an important part of THE and this simple demo illustrates some of the ways that zooming solves the navigation problems posed by our present system of links, tabs, and other click-and-go-there interfaces. The design specification calls for the left mouse button to zoom in and the right to zoom out. Unfortunately, Macromedia's Flash, in which this demo was implemented, does not reconize mouse buttons so we have to use the keyboard buttons, even though they are not nearly as pleasant to use.

The demo is a map of the entire Internet. As the devloper stated, "At the moment we're displaying the owner of each IP address (grey boxes), and which IP addresses are listed on the Spamhaus XBL blacklist (red dots), but we should be able to show other things in the future. Currently, we map all 4,294,967,296 IP addresses onto a huge image and let you zoom into it and pan around. Just like google maps, but more internetty. We've taken snapshots of the internet routing table (from CAIDA for this demo, but we'd probably use a local BGP feed out of preference) to work out who owns each IP address, and a snapshot of the Spamhaus XBL as some interesting data to overlay on the map. Then we use a Hilbert curve to map those addresses onto a two-dimensional map, as inspired by xkcd, so that nearby IP addresses are nearby on the map and so that CIDR ranges (the usual way blocks of IP addresses are broken down) map onto squares or rectangles."

Another great interface by Moritz Stefaner of Well-formed data, as he stated, "As a side product of my work on web feed visualization, I made a small comparison of different ways to deal with temporal information in lists of microcontent, such as e.g. blog entries. To support my argument, I also made small demonstrator based on actual web feed data. It takes a while to load (~700k of data), so please be patient. On the left, you have a menu for selecting different feeds. On the right, I drew a connection of each item to a calendar with fancy curved lines. You can adjust the size of the displayed items with the zoom slider."