Digigen & The TinMan

Not much really needs to be said about this brilliant Christmas piece of creative from AKQA. Released a week or so ago, I think its quite genius.

This is a great bit of work from a guy called Paul Butler, who spent time trying to figure out how to visualise friendships across Facebook. It took alot of work but by using some open source technology Paul developed a stunning picture.

At that point, I began exploring it in R, an open-source statistics environment. As a sanity check, I plotted points at some of the latitude and longitude coordinates. To my relief, what I saw was roughly an outline of the world. Next I erased the dots and plotted lines between the points. After a few minutes of rendering, a big white blob appeared in the center of the map. Some of the outer edges of the blob vaguely resembled the continents, but it was clear that I had too much data to get interesting results just by drawing lines. I thought that making the lines semi-transparent would do the trick, but I quickly realized that my graphing environment couldn’t handle enough shades of color for it to work the way I wanted.

Instead I found a way to simulate the effect I wanted. I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. I used a color ramp from black to blue to white, with each line’s color depending on its weight. I also transformed some of the lines to wrap around the image, rather than spanning more than halfway around the world.

Link here to the full story.

For those budding DJs and VJs out there, it has always been a challenge on how to take a playlist or list of favourites from YouTube and turn them into an interesting, accessible mix. Well, look no further as the superb DragonTape will help take care of all of that.

Not entirely sure whether its actually DragonTape, DragOnTape, or something else, but the solution is the same. The idea being that:

Dragontape is a collaborative webservice that lets you create 3-hour mixtapes of your favorite YouTube videos. Mixtapes are easy to use, simple to share with friends, and let you focus on having a good time watching videos.

and who could argue with that? Here is one I didn’t make earlier…

If you have any of your own mixes from Dragontape drop them in the comments below the jump..

2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010 had more in common than you thought. Every single January of each of these years, mobile experts, advertising gurus, and the man on the street, have predicted that “this year will be the year of mobile”. Sadly, this can only genuinely be said for one of the four years and you guessed it, we mean 2010.

2010 has been a seemingly outrageously successful year for mobiles. Smartphones have grown significantly in use. App usage has therefore exploded. Apps I want to use, therefore, have also grown. However, with the acquisition of Admob by Google, even mobile advertising has seen stunning and noticeable growth. In addition, Location-Based services have proved that there is a bright future ahead for the convergence of augmented reality, social media channels, and your handheld mobile phone.

In celebration of this, here is a video about the mobile phone’s outrageous 2010…I’m sure he is uploading his pictures on Facebook as we speak…

Link here to MobileFuture website

If you want mobile advice talk to these guys Lucidity Mobile

They say that the quickest way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Perhaps then the guys at The Conflict Kitchen thought the quickest way into the nation’s heart is also through its stomach. That is why The Conflict Kitchen has started to bring the food of nations at war or with conflict against the US (if you believe the Wikileaks stories then there will be a whole range of global culinary items) to the streets of Pittsburgh in the US.

Currently ranging from Afghan to Iranian food, the takeouts have been created by John Peña, Jon Rubin, and Dawn Weleski and is funded by the Sprout Fund, The Waffle Shop, the Center for the Arts in Society, and the sale of food. To me this is a really interesting take on conflict resolution. By getting the general public to see that the food their global neighbours eat is something to be jealous of perhaps the US public will begin to take these countries to their hearts, want to know more about the reasons behind the conflict, and seek resolution.

Link here to Conflict Kitchen blog