Infographic: How Local News Is Going Mobile
12:30 pm
Satellite Photos of Japan Before and After Tsunami
8:00 am
The New York Times has a collection of breathtaking photos from various satellites before-and-after the recent Tsunami and Earthquake. Each photo-pair is connected to a slider so that you can wipe back and forth between the two and get a glimpse at the incredible damage mother-nature wrought upon Japan.
Satellite Photos – Japan Before and After Tsunami – Interactive Feature – NYTimes.com.
Knight News Challenge awards
6:34 pm
The Knight Foundation has announced the winners of the annual Knight News Challenge, and it includes a few important tools for data visualizations for journalists. Eric Rodenbeck’s ‘CityTracking’ won $400k, and Eric Gundersen’s ‘Tilemapping’ gets a nice $74,000 to make map mash-ups simpler.
Hear the winning entries pitch their ideas in the video above.
The Day’s Events as a Social Network
4:30 pm
Slate has an interesting application that they have just put on-line. They call is News Dots. What the application does is it connects the day’s news events in a social network. Some of the networks are isolated from one another, such as David Cos and Mount Saint Helens. Other news stories connect to one another in a myriad of ways, such as U.S. President Barack Obama connecting to 38 other topics. I like the fact that you can jump to a specific news tag, and even go back in time on a day-by-day basis. The one downside that I see to this social network of news stories is that Joseph Andrew Stack, who crashed a plane into a IRS building a few hours ago, is not mentioned. In other words, it appears that breaking stories may be missed. I am sure that the application will be upgraded over time to include this feature.
Watch Science News with LabGrab’s BoxGraph
12:00 pm
Labgrab.com has just released a neat visualization tool for parsing the massive volume of science news as a collection of box graphs.
Inspired by similar data visualization tools, this flash based application is the newest rich internet application (RIA) addition to hit the online science community. “We read a statistic that roughly 10,000 items of science news were published daily and thought it would be intriguing to animate that day after day” said Jed Herzog, lead developer on the project.
VizWorld.com. Doing our part to make that Science & Technology box just a little bit bigger since 2009.
BoxGraph via Science News Goes Visual with “Grab More Science” Graph from LabGrab.com.
Laughable CG Re-enactment of the Tiger Woods Crash
9:30 am
A Taiwanese news organization was unsatisfied with the lack of visuals in the recent Tiger Woods crash, so took it upon themselves to recreate the event in some laughably bad CG. Complete with an action packed crash scene, thought bubbles, a lover’s quarrel, and his wife (Elin Nordegren) chasing his SUV with a Golf Club, it’s just good entertainment.
See the video after the break.
Visualizing News on the iPhone with ZenNews
10:06 am
A new iPhone app from Zensify called ZenNews combines social media and networking with popular news sites to present a “popularity” visualization with tag-clouds, providing an interesting visualization of what’s trending in the social media world.
When you open ZenNews up, you see keyword clouds for the news stories that are currently gaining traction and being discussed across the world. The bigger the cloud, the more coverage or discussion associated with the topic.
Click on a keyword and you can further drill down a specific aspect of that keyword (so clicking “Pakistan” might lead to clouds that include “bomber” or “coordinated”) and clicking on those keywords will lead to a list of stories from various news sources. You can also view keyword clouds from specific news sources, like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The BBC and even TweetMeme
The app is available in iTunes (link).
via Zensify Combines News Visualization and Social Media on iPhone.
Deadline nears for Meteor Studios VFX Settlement
2:50 pm
While not our usual content here at VizWorld, I wanted to give a little publicity to the plight of the VFX experts who worked for Meteor Studios on “Journey to the Center of the Earth”.
The curtain closes this weekend on an offer to more than 100 mainly Canadian movie special-effects artists attempting to recuperate nearly $1.2 million they claim is owed them for work done on one of last summer’s biggest blockbusters.
Monday is the deadline for them to accept or reject about 63 per cent of that amount from the owners of Meteor, the Montreal facility that closed in November 2007 after wrapping up Journey to the Centre of the Earth, then filed for bankruptcy.
If you’re not familar with their story, they worked relentlessly during the creation of the picture, and the studio went bankrupt during that time. They’ve since been labeled unsecured creditors and have not been paid for their work. This has been going on for over a year now.
MemeTracker Visualizes Media Quotes
10:57 am
Between the recent economic collapse, the presidential election, and the many celebrity deaths, the media has been cranking out one-liners and soundbites quicker than we can process them. MemeTracker, from researchers at Stanford and Cornell, visualizes popular memes over a three-month period. Containing such classics as “lipstick on a pig” (Barack Obama on Sarah Palin) and ” I fell in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else’s”, (John McCain, on his POW experience) it’s an interesting visualization showing how the phrases evolve and keep returning cyclically.
The researchers have published a paper describing the algorithms used to catalog, group, and analyze the 90 million articles gathered for the project. The paper is available here.
Aaron Presnall’s Knight News Challenge Award
2:30 pm
Aaron Presnail has recently won the Knight News Challenge award, putting in control of a quarter million dollars. What does he plan to do with it?
He also understands that only a handful of news outlets can afford to invest significant resources in the beautiful-yet-intelligible presentation of such data, which is why he plans to use his $243,600 Knight News Challenge award to build an open-source data visualization module targeting community newspapers, independent journalists and bloggers — really, anyone interested in publishing data visualizations.
VizWorld.com 
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