June 05, 2007

Etsy Geolocator

Geolocator is an interactive 3D world globe illustrating the location of Etsy sellers. Users can search the globe for products by tags, materials, seller names or location.

March 01, 2007

Wieden & Kennedy Website

For it's 25th Anniversary as the biggest independent Advertising Agency, Wieden & Kennedy relaunched their website to celebrate and showcase their 25 years of work. After just a couple of discussions with the Agency, we realized that the best way to showcase all their immense amount of work, was to focus on all their 'metadata'. That is, show the work and illustrate around each piece as much related content as we could find. That way we created an experience that is centered on keyword navigation, either related to people, projects, clients, awards or a large set of general tags.

May 05, 2006

OFFF Barcelona

I will be presenting together with the amazing Jonathan Harris in the upcoming OFFF festival in Barcelona (May 11,12, 13). We'll both be talking about creative ways to play with information. Please come and say hi! I'd also like to take the opportunity to mention I've been really bussy with real work (the type that helps pay the bills) so that's why you haven't seen much updates here lately. Still creative steam has been piling up and you'll be able to see tons of new stuff around. Also If you've sent me an email and haven't heard back from me yet, please, please ping me again. I've just spent the last 3 days replying to old emails and I'm not through even half of it yet.

September 16, 2004

newsmap goes squarified

I just updated newsmap to a new version fancying a squarified treemap layout algorithm, which tries to keep the aspect ratio of each cell as close to 1:1 as possible. That should make headlines easier to read. It's interesting to see how this new layout gives a different perception of what is big news today. Confused? The biggest news will always be on the top left corner inside each category, the smallest one on the bottom right. The placement of all categories and countries follow the same principle, when the sum of related articles for one story inside each country/category is the greatest, it will be shifted to the top left corner, the smallest ones shift to the bottom right. Of course you can always switch to the standard layout by selecting so in the bottom right of the screen. Use "permalink" to create your custom link for the view you selected.

August 16, 2004

Newsmap Goes Squarified

I just updated newsmap to a new version fancying a squarified treemap layout algorithm, which tries to keep the aspect ratio of each cell as close to 1:1 as possible. That should make headlines easier to read. It's interesting to see how this new layout gives a different perception of what is big news today. Confused? The biggest news will always be on the top left corner inside each category, the smallest one on the bottom right. The placement of all categories and countries follow the same principle, when the sum of related articles for one story inside each country/category is the greatest, it will be shifted to the top left corner, the smallest ones shift to the bottom right. Of course you can always switch to the standard layout by selecting so in the bottom right of the screen. Use "permalink" to create your custom link for the view you selected.

May 17, 2004

DIY Social Circles

So you're probably tired of looking over and over the same lists in Social Circles. Since day 1 of this project Dan always wanted to let users look into their own mailbox too. So he grabbed the original source code and rewrote it so that you can now visualize the mailing lists YOU are subscribed to. So what are you waiting for, go try DIY Social Circles! We haven't tested this one thoroughly so if it doesn't work for you, please, please drop me a line: [mail ATT marcosweskamp DOTT com]

March 30, 2004

a map of the news media

just finished killing the last bug I had in my list before releasing this new project. newsmap is an application that visualizes the totality of the GoogleNews aggregator. The GoogleNews aggregator is an amazing piece of software, not only aggregates almost every single online newspaper, but it also combines news stories into clusters so that when the same story is repeated among several news sites, it files and displays only one to you - no mater how different the actual text that makes the article is. Even the same story, told from completely different points of view, get's filed as one single entry. Google news aggreagates stories in several languages and customizes it's content for 10 particular countries. I've loved googlenews for this particular reason since the first day, and it was then when I started thinking about visualizing the totality of it, since it could be a very close approach to getting a picture on how news media attention differs from country to country. Newsmap utilizes a treemap algorithm to dynamically create each view, and the size of each cell is determined by the amount of related articles that exist inside each news cluster. this could have never been finished without the invaluable help of Dan and Gus - thanks a lot guys! launch the project over here

March 30, 2004

newsmap

Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator.

A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.

Newsmap's objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media.

January 04, 2004

Visualizing Mailing Lists Communities

I was always intrigued by how are the dynamics of mailing lists, who are the moderators, which are the persons that everyone listens to, which are the main central themes of them, how do they organize themselves. I've had this idea floating around for a while, and it wasn't until these holidays that I could give it a shot. social circles Data to visualize flows in in near realtime, that is to say these are almost *live* snapshots of the current status of these mailing lists. Currently I'm visualizing the mailing lists I'm subscribed to. If anyone has other ideas on lists that you'd like to see, drop me a line. Also, we are working with Dan in a version that will allow you to directly visualize your own inbox, which hopefully we'll have up pretty soon. Credits: Idea, Design, Frontend & Backend coding: me. Backend coding: Dan.

November 20, 2003

social circles

Social Circles intends to partially reveal the social networks that emerge in mailing lists. The idea was to visualize in near real-time the social hierarchies and the main subjects they address. When subscribing to a mailing you never know who the principals are, how many people are listening or what subjects they are talking about. It's like entering a meeting room with plenty of people in the darkness and then having to learn who is who by just listening to their voices.

Social Circles aims to raise the lights in that room just enough to let you enhance your perception of what?s happening. At a glance it allows an easy way of grasping the whole situation by highlighting who is participating, who is "visually" central to that group, and displaying the topics everyone is talking about. How does the list structure itself? Is it moderated? Is it chaotic?

October 29, 2003

Habitat Perspectives

Habitat perspectives is an online instalation that atempts to visualize spatio-temporaly the places we inhabit. Through GPS-capable mobile phones, participants will be posting geocoded images to an online shared space which starts as a black canvas. As participants post more and more content, a map of the city, and the map of each of the participants "places" will slowly start emerging. One of ther reasons why Tokyo is such a mess as a city is that it is a tangled mess of intertwining main streets intersected and crisscrossed by back alleys and side streets. Specially when you don't own a car, and you mainly travel by subway as most other citizens, one of the biggest problems you get in such a place is that you never get to mentally visualize the relationship among all the places you usually hang out at. You only know about "islands" in the city; you get in the subway in Shinjuku island, you pop-up in Shibuya island. The more you move around those spaces you'll slowly start turning them into neighborhoods, along with your own personal networks of places. If you asked a group of people to draw you a map of the city, you'll notice that all of them will be inevitably different - each of them will have their own particular perspective of their habitat. This is currently work in progress, so as time allows, I'll be adding more functionality to it. Also, I'm currently looking for participants, so if you are interested in popping up in there, please don't hesitate to drop me a line: [ mail at marcosweskamp.com ] visit the instalation

May 16, 2003

Desktop Activity Monitor

Couple of weeks ago I was sent a copy of Screenweaver by the guys at Rubberduck (thank you so much!), read some docs, saw a couple of samples, and today after work, I was able to put together this little gadget that you can see now on the left side of the top page of my blog. On Chapter 6 of Collaborative Virtual Environments, under the title of "All that is solid melts into software" , Andrew McGrath and Wolfgang Prinz, point out the importance of mutual awareness of the activities individuals are engaged into when sharing the same physical environment. Say for example I'm at the office, and doing some research on Informational Diagrams, I decide to see what we have in the bookshelf here so I move towards that area. If there's someone already standing infront of the Data Visualization section, I will inevitably ask them for a recommendation. Later I need to do some scans so I move to the scanning station. Say someone comes over, since scanning is probably just a click and wait thing, we will probably get engaged in a random conversation. But as soon as I go sit back at my desk and everyone noticing that I'm working, chances of someone showing up talking about the weather are really low. Most probably my neighbour will tap me in the shoulder with sporadically questions about work, and I will probably forward the question to the guy on the other side who will stand up, and come over to have a quick meeting infront of my neighbour's monitor where we will share ideas, point to the images in the screen, etc. until we reach consensus. Well in this chapter, they talk about an application, "Forum", which basically logs you into an online multi user environment which will keep track of your activities and through analysis of what is currently your focus of attention, will move your Avatar towards the areas of interest. For example If I open a text file and write a bunch of lines of ActionScript over there, the system will automatically move my avatar towards the ActionScript area, where I will join all the other users working on ActionScript at that time. Later I move onto a XML document, and my Avatar will automatically be moved into the XML area. I suddenly need some advice on that, so I can try text Chatting with one of the persons over there, maybe upgrading into a video chat later if it is needed. So I decided to give it a shot, and that's what you can see now here. Well yeah, this little app is only one-way at the moment (only YOU can see what I'm up to) and there's not a lot of visualization, except the lill stats, but if people out there are interested, maybe I could extend this so that I can support several users and pump it up a little bit more to a real app. The way it works is very simple: basically I have a desktop app which registers what am I currently working on, and before posting that to FlashComm, it filters the results through a white list of applications I gave clearance to. Well, yeah, sometimes I maybe working on some super-secret documents which I may not want everyone know about right? Maybe the guys working at the Together project maybe interested in such a tool? Well yeah, worry now about big brother... Update: wow, got heavilly linked during the weekend! mesh voisen.org coldstorageonline PeterJoel Moik78 Better behave myself, feels weird beeing watched like that;P Thanks everyone for the hookup!

December 31, 1969