However as someone who takes a pretty guerilla approach to the matter I’ve never been exposed to anything approaching the Zeitgeist of typographic design. Now I can say Tim Brown’s talk at last year’s Build has succeeded in forcefully injecting me with the importance – and centrality – of typography in modern web design.

If you haven’t already, I’d recommend taking the half an hour to listen in:

Tim Brown – More Perfect Typography from Build on Vimeo.

One of the two external links Brown provides goes further into how basic characteristics of type can influence the wider design.

The theoretical physicist Geoffrey West criticised existing accepted thought in urban theory before coming up with a set of constants that defined the relationship between city size and the output of it’s citizens (Each time a city doubles in size it’s per capita innovation, income, etc increases by 15% – and likewise the negative social actions of crime, pollution…). Previously he found a similar efficiency in biology where the larger an organism was the less energy per unit mass it required to go about it’s life.

It’s this track record in reducing a problem domain to a simple set of rules & constraints that is so impressive. The way in which theoretical physics practitioners go about solving for x – the sense of minimalism that drives the crunching of gigs of data and seemingly chaotic environment into understandable, predictable systems. It’s raw data visualisation in it’s purest form.

And then we have the humble infographic.

A little like urban theory at present far from being a true ‘data’ oriented approach they have morphed from original good intentions into a viral sub-genre seemingly as gratification for the design community while conveying no more than a smattering of anecdotal crumbs as an afterthought. Who cares if it’s insightful so long as it’s typeface looks cool.

Unconvinced?

Look at a recent effort from the popular information is beautiful site. The title leads us to believe there is a message about debt buried in the animated visualisations. Well, that’s a matter for debate. There is a bunch of figures expressed in terms of tetris blocks with area equating to amount. But it’s such a jumble of data without any clever way of giving context or connection beyond one dimensional “Data A vs Data B” scalar quantities.

For instance, the cost of the credit crunch is compared to African debt. One is many times more than the other. Perhaps worth some kind of further analysis, if only to see if there is some kind of basic relationship holding these unrelated numbers together. But it’s actually at the end of the clip, one that started off with everything from Tesco’s revenue to some guy’s net worth to the annual level of corporate tax evasion. The clever bit is apparently getting all these random amounts to slot together nicely as Tetris blocks….

So what? Where is the relationship? What is linking them? Where is the message?

And so here is an animated gimmick that tells us a bunch of unrelated numbers and surprisingly enough doesn’t try to relate them. It’s medium is certainly graphical. Is the data presented really ‘info’? Has the web deluge instead merely managed to dilute ‘info’ to mean any random factoid? I’ll be honest, there are people out there describing themselves as data geeks and I doubt they’ve touched the fundamentals of mathematics since GCSE.

Btw I’m in no way picking on just the above case, it just happened to be the first one I found. The web’s full of similarly vacuous ‘infographics’ that offer little in the way of truly informing people..

Undoubtedly there is an important place for real data graphics in popular science today. Peer through the sea of non-existent ‘insight’ and hubris surrounding the more widely circulated pseudo-data variant. The best graphics can guide the viewer no matter what they’re level of expertise to take in a startling array of data in a matter of seconds and crucially allow expression of context and relationship.

We need to get back to what infographics were developed for: rich visualisations of complex data expressed in a manner that conveys a simple overarching relationship to the observer free from narcissistic clutter and plain randomness.

A grand title, considering the relatively niche aspect of government communications that piqued my interest in the subject. But it’s something that should perhaps be given much greater emphasis as society increasingly interacts with the state online.

I got the link to my regional government’s draft budget on twitter via a url shortening service run by the department in question. Nothing radical about that except for the fact they chose to use ‘.me’ as the top level domain – a snappy TLD that is utilised by many url shorteners no doubt (including a friend’s) but also one that is run by a foreign government – Montenegro in this case.

I’m not about to suggest Montenegro, a superbly sunny state similar in size to NI and one which I’ve had the good fortune to visit, is about to turn rogue. But there are potential issues with using foreign TLDs, sufficiently to warrant a second opinion by government on whether they should be relying on such a service.

And this is the point about info flow for government online. Links are obviously the lifeblood of the internet and anything aiding the sharing them is to be encouraged. URL shorteners are predominantly used for temporary communication. But surely it’s important for government services that they can guarantee their links will not go stale, whether due to shortener natural ‘overwriting’ or overseas issues beyond their control?

In the real world, lost communications cost government and people money. The same is true online.

Google has done two ‘real-time’ things lately, one good one not so good: Real Time web indexing and real time web search.

With ‘er, hang-on a minute…‘ moments now surfacing in the public domain I find the contrast between the two to be especially important. Google in their traditional engineer style expound the benefits of both in shaving seconds of search: ’11 user hours saved globally each second’; ’50% faster indexing rate of content’; figures that prove the mantra – machines search better than humans.

Machines definitely do the donkey work better than humans. Indexing is a dumb process easily solvable by machine and has been for decades. The migration from batch processing to incremental updating of the search index that Google Caffeine delivers is an essential improvement to real time search.

The Google Instant realtime GUI trick is not such a homerun. Instant brings up a full page of results updated character by character. In cases where the user searches over two or more words – in my experience the vast majority of search – context is vital. Rarely is that context clear until the entire phrase is typed in. This is why google instant, as fast as it undoubtedly is, rarely returns what you’re looking for until you complete your search term.

In any case, the Mind Machine Interface is a delicate thing and only as strong as the weakest link – the human. And it’s the human that has to comprehend this extra flow of data, most of it extraneous.

Google does not yet do the contextual understanding the user must accomplish to use Instant search successfully – and I wouldn’t like them to try, as that would likely involve personalisation based on past searches and as my browsing habits change over time I don’t want past results skewing things.

Incidently an ulterior motive for Google Instant can always be found on the web.

So in conclusion real time is only useful when the data can be transformed into a form easily processed as by the end user. If it cannot it instead serves to exacerbate the problem of information overload rather than lessening it.

The ideal real time UI has yet to be realised.

I agree with the enthusiasts – form factor is all-important

For this reason I believe a netbook is superior when veging out in front of the tele – after all, I don’t hold the remote continuously while watching a programme so why should I have to hold a computer to surf the web?

Ok so really I’m just a petty net troll who completely overreacts to criticism online. That aside, I still cannot understand how the answering army at stackoverflow come to the collective conclusion that every question on a close-to-the-bone programming issue requires some inane form of rephrasing or just outright blanking.

I get over the former as SO is a lightning quick method of accessing really knowledgeable people on demand – but I had to endure a case of the later a while back when someone obviously thought the answer to the question I asked was too blase and proceded to provide a solution for a completely separate issue. And this despite me explaining exactly why I didn’t want his solution in the preamble. So I went and got a workable answer myself, posted it and accepted it as the solution. Job done.

Except this caused numbnuts to vote down my answer without explanation. So I voted his down, and told him why. Despite this, he questioned why I’d want to know what I wanted to know in the first place and voted down the question. It was at that moment that I realised SO, while largely self-moderating, is still missing the last 20%^TM required to remove the clinically insane from the process. It gives me no pleasure to disclose the most efficient solution currently is to multiply your web leverage in traditional fashion; create multiple accounts and hit back with a bewildering array of counter-comments and down votes…

It is embarrassing though when apparently throwaway questions asked on your secondary accounts are rated higher than your allegedly thought-provoking and succinct real persona *whistles*

In true Bileblog style, programmers appear to be sarky contemptible bastards who like nothing more than jumping on the inaccuracies of accepted thought; hence phrasing a question along the lines of ‘My colleague says x is no longer a good way to do things…’ will likely stir the hornet’s nest of pedantry as each contributor seeks to provide a more arcane answer as to why x sucks than the previous response. Recurse until someone mentions lambda.

Half way through last week a nation erupted; the Republic of Ireland football team crashed out of the World Cup at the hand of Gaul, that of a certain Thierry Henry. A Facebook group was established. It took on something of a life of it’s own – over 300k users inside the first 24 hours.

“Something has to be done”.

FIFA made no mention of the incident in their official match report. It was edited several times, each time the Magnum PIs on Twitter reporting to the world the latest breach of instant populist moral values and punch-drunk notions of democracy. Avatars may not have been coloured green, but the online social network air was turning a particularly dark shade of blue and the feedback loop of increasingly agitated noise fed into itself, reaching a deafening cresendo online while steadily losing touch with reality.

Of course the same old predictable new media rubbish was trotted out the next day. Sky Sports News ran with the facebook group, the Guardian ran with the usual ‘Twittersphere exposes FIFA duplicity’ bollocks and generally everything was very ‘the power of the web this’, ‘online social network that’.

And then… nothing happened. The irate fans presumably sobered up and went back to whatever they were doing had the South not qualified and the ludicrous calls from the FAI and bandwagon jumping politicians had officially fallen on deaf ears at FIFA.

This left the organiser of the original page on Facebook – by this stage 400k strong – to lead a merry band of 150 people with nothing better to do on a Saturday afternoon to the French Embassy in Dublin. Ably assisted by Dustin the Turkey.

I guess I’m not doing a complete hatchet job on online campaigning here. There is a kind of potential value in online networks, but in each case until a method is found to unlock it, it remains just that – potential. After all the hullabaloo generated in the RoI football case a conversion rate of just .04% (with some generous rounding on my part) to partake in some form of action highlights what surely is the case for a majority of internet based issues – that they struggle to make the leap into anything meaningful in the physical world.

Certainly in PR terms it has a discrete value – albeit one that is more difficult to control. By saturday, realtime opinion regarding the protest march – the same medium that had elevated the issue to frontpage news only two days before – had largely reduced it to a laughing stock:

try living in Ireland – there’s a march on the French Embassy today. In this weather. I’m hoping all the idiots drown.
SpodoKomodo twitter update

I had hoped to discuss some numbers taking both leading Facebook & App Store games as a jumping off point. But one look at my Twitter homepage this morning aroused some angst.

To their credit the realtime stream networks have opened up their far-reaching update networks to 3rd party developers without holding much back. Photos on facebook and throttling search on twitter are by and large minor holdups which would presumably have grave performance issues to overcome first anyway.

But this power in the hands of developers doesn’t come without responsibilities.

Unfortunately there has already been what I would call a serious breach of both the twitter and facebook reason d’etre – communication amongst the network. Check out this post from back in 2007 for a critique of what makes a good facebook app – and this from a marketeer of all things. Now fast forward to today’s Twitter and check out one of the trending topics – ‘pirates’. Not because of the ongoing web meme – no this Pirates refers to Zynga’s social network app available on FB & MySpace.

The lead graphic shows the gorey details – users are now encouraged to cross post their in-game achievements onto their twitter accounts. And because a bazillion of us play these games (& are willing to do anything to get special items, including filling out marketing forms on anything from insurance to mobile phones) this created enough buzz through either direct postings or the predictable but similarly idiotic “why is pirates trending?” postings now proping up numerous worthless ‘trends’ on Twitter these days.

But the value of trending topics once they have got onto the user’s twitter homepage is for another day. As is the dubious lengths some social gaming apps will go to in supplying advert networks with Facebook user data. These automated updates from gaming platforms need to be nipped in the bud right now.

One such tweet on the left here. When I think of why I have a Twitter account – to connect with interesting individuals whom I have nor might ever physically meet and to follow breaking news in near-realtime – this guff frankly does not appeal to me. It’s polluting twitter no doubt about it. As you can see Zynga have created their own special client to deliver inane bs direct to your homepage.

Personally I have a policy of immediately unfollowing anyone who feels it necessary to add such content to their account. Dealing with manual spam especially connected around trending topics is a more nuanced problem.

But mass auto distribution by gaming platforms can be nipped in the bud right now.

This could be a turning point on the web.Vic Gundotra, Google Engineering VP

On seeing a screenshot my first thought was ‘Facebook news feed’.

It’s got a similar albeit primitive system of inline comment right now. While it’s a nice to have, it’s not ‘killer’ and some of the Wave features (every character typed is spewed out in realtime as if participants were viewing the same terminal) will turn a lot of people off straight away. Indeed I’ve a few ideas of my own regarding ‘next generation’ communication, and they don’t involve greater intrusion. While the inline editing is a good thing I don’t regard it as a big enough win to justify moving onto a new platform, cloud or no cloud. What would be wrong with sticking this kind of functionality into Google Docs? We need smarter comms not more of them.

First quality flame post appears to be at Gigaom…

 But there it is.  An Afghan blog (sadly not updated since ’07) concentrating on issues of Herat and it’s hinterland – publishes reports submitted from various news agencies around the country.  What I am so impressed by is the simple addition of a ‘description of source’ footnote to the bottom of any external piece.  Contrast that with Western media treatment of current hot potato the Gaza Strip, where any random eye-witness appears to be taken at face value and any opinion an authoritive one.

[Description of Source: Peshawar Afghan Islamic Press in Pashto -- Peshawar-based agency, staffed by Afghans. The agency used to have good contacts with Taliban leadership; however, since the fall of the Taliban regime, it now describes itself as independent and self-financing. OSC IAP20071006950019 Peshawar Afghan Islamic Press in Pashto 1916 GMT 06 Oct 07]

By my reckoning the BBC would do well to provide such explanatory warning notes with a good proportion of it’s foreign correspondents!  Tribal Afghanistan is a complex society whose divisions at first seem obvious but as more is learned what was black & white becomes ever greyer, something we have a taste for in NI too.  At least some of their press seem to know how to see the wood from the trees.