Some fun queries:

• site:wikipedia.com (they hadn’t moved to their .org home at that stage)
  
• “upload videos” compared to today’s results
• “subprime mortgage” risk. How funny.
• “social network” points to academic work in Sociology

I could do this for hours!

Let me know if you come across any interesting results.

Harvard Business has a great interactive chart showing economic cycles in the U.S. over the last 60 years.

If you step away from the screen, and squint a little, it looks exponential.

Click through to Harvard Business for the full interaction.

I’m planning to play around with it for a while, and hopefully move all of my short-form stuff from other places on the web to my Sweetcron lifestream. My blog, though, would hold any sort of post that requires real thought.

Here’s a shot of some recent lifestream items using the shipped theme:

What do I like so far about Sweetcron?

• I can control the design (and so, the user experience). As much as I like Kevin Fox’s creations, I want to dictate how people experience my lifestream (in a way that is quite different to friendfeed).
• It aggregates tags. Blog tags, delicious tags etc get pooled together. I haven’t seen this functionality before, and it’s very cool. If you only care about the ‘maths’ part of my life, you can go and see anything tagged ‘maths’ as a vertical cross-section of everything I do on the web.
• Anybody can comment on anything. Users don’t have to sign up - they just comment using whatever external commenting system you choose (such as Disqus). And it can be in response to any item (like on friendfeed). I like this way of handling comments - less social, but more open than a centralized system like friendfeed is.

What don’t I like?

Nothing I can see right now. Besides, it’s open source, extensible, and written in php. So if there’s anything I don’t like I can probably just fix it!

You can see my Sweetcron lifestream at /life/ or download the platform itself at the Sweetcron site.

I’m trying to design a better way to present large amounts of plain text online. At the moment I’m experimenting with narrow columns and a strong page metaphor in lieu of scrolling - things that would have been unthinkably difficult until recently. jQuery allows us to do these things, and more.

I should point out that this is very experimental at the moment. I’m pretty sure it won’t work in IE yet, and there are a number of known issues I intend to work on.

You can take a sneak peak at my progress here. Make sure you play around with resizing the window, and flipping pages.

Screenshot:

jBook (is very experimental at this stage).

I would recommend it to anybody who deals with communication, marketing or design of corporate websites.

Particularly interesting (to me) are those guidelines that deal solely with design, rather than content:

6. Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose).

We find that people quickly evaluate a site by visual design alone. When designing your site, pay attention to layout, typography, images, consistency issues, and more…

7. Make your site easy to use — and useful.

… Our research shows that sites win credibility points by being both easy to use and useful. Some site operators forget about users when they cater to their own company’s ego or try to show the dazzling things they can do with web technology…

10. Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small.

Typographical errors and broken links hurt a site’s credibility more than most people imagine. It’s also important to keep your site up and running.

Obviously there are a number of other recommendation that aren’t design-based, but I pulled these out as a reminder that web design is intimately connected to communications and credibility-building. It’s something that all designers should be mindful of.

P.S. For those with a deep interest in web credibility, there are some great resources at the Stanford Web Credibility Research site.

2008 US Movie Box Office visualization by Zach Beane

(via swissmiss via GenPink)

Well if you believe NBCOlympics, it’s the US with 110 medals.

But that’s absurd, right? China won almost everything, achieving 51 gold medals to just 36 by the States.

If we count a gold medal as three points, silver as two and bronze as one, we have China with 223 points just scraping past the US with 220.

Though if you ask me, you should not only weight medals by value, but also normalize according to population and GDP. When you do so, you see the Bahamas had the greatest success at the Beijing Olympics with an impressive 1267.2 points per million people per trillion dollars GDP! By that standard, the US comes in at 83 out of 88 medal-winning countries and China at 86!

I threw together a bit of actionscript so you can see how the rankings move around with this normalization (if you are using a feed reader you will need to click through):

Some interesting results, yes? Bahamas clearly ahead. Caribbean countries and Western Ex-Soviet Republics very well represented (for obvious reasons really). Australia high once again on the population-normalized chart but dropping away when GDP is considered.

A note on units:

When normalized by population, you are seeing the number of medals or points per million in population. When normalized by GDP, it is the number of medals or points per trillion dollars of GDP (not GDP per capita). So with both selected, we have medals or points per million people per trillion dollars of GDP.

Hope you enjoy!

Oh and if you want to do your own work on this, feel free to download the xml file I used.

UPDATE: Graham points out that some of the text is disappearing in IE7. If this is the case for you, try looking at the table in isolation.

I’ve made a WordPress theme based on the site design of web usability expert Dr. Jakob Nielsen. For those who don’t know, Jakob’s success and committed following have shielded him from the last 10 or so years of developments in web design. His site is a time-machine to 1995, and while perfectly accessible has attracted some justifiable criticism for its nauseating design.

Creating the Jakobian WordPress theme was actually a fun exercise - it’s not every day that you get to go under the hood of such an ancient site.

If for some reason you actually want to use Jakobian, you can download it here.

Google Insights provides the interesting capability of viewing the relative search volume of keywords mapped to a geography. So for instance, Andrew Chen has used the tool to identify websites used by early adopters. This is handy both directly for web strategy, as well as indirectly as a proxy for spread of usage.

One feature that’s missing though is a quantitative measure of spread. I want to know, for instance, the degree of usage of TechCrunch relative to the NYT. Or of my new startup compared to established competitors. Or of a US brand compared to a competing European brand. And I want it in numbers.

For this, you need to take the CSV dump from Google Insights and take the standard deviation of the values for the “top regions for [keyword]” with some adjustments due to the dorky way that Google gives you data.

Or if you don’t want to do that, you could just plug your CSV files into the geographic spread calculator that I threw together this morning.

Here are some fun queries I prepared earlier:

• Obama vs McCain internationally
• Obama vs McCain in the US
• Top social networks
• Australian print newspapers
• “Olympic swimming” vs “South Ossetia”

Have fun, and let me know if you come up with anything interesting!