Flickr Users’ Traces Make Accidental Maps — David Crandall and colleagues at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, analysed the data attached to 35 million photographs uploaded to the Flickr website to create accurate global and city maps and identify popular snapping sites. (via straup on delicious)
MW 2009 Wrapup (Powerhouse Museum) — summary of the Museums and the Web conference from Seb Chan, one of the bright sparks. Why do I care about cultural institutions getting their web mojo happening? Because they have volumes of metadata, images, and text that I can only dream of. Interesting tidbit: to build their API (now in private beta), the Victoria and Albert had to scrape their own online catalog. Proprietary systems are a plague in every industry.
Visualization of the Phosphoproteomic Data from AfCS with the Google Motion Chart Gadget — definitely wins the award for “paper whose title contains words I never thought I’d see together in the pages of Nature” (see also “Safe and efficient use of the Internet” published in the British Dental Journal). Interesting because mass availability of nifty visualization gadgets brings insight of big data closer to everyone: first the geeks, then the scientists, then businesses, then the schools, then everyone can do it and it’s no longer interesting.
Designing for Big Data (Jeff Veen) — video of Jeff’s talk from the Web 2.0 Expo about the challenges of designing for the presentation or manipulation of big data sets. He was project lead for Measure Map, which became Google Analytics.
