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S.S. Kumar

Catch the eye, and the concept.

A picture can tell a thousand words. An animation can tell you more, maybe? I have always been fascinated by infographics and have been a great fan of good work done by Gapminder ( http://www.gapminder.org) as well as the New York Times online (I have written about Gapminder and New York Times interactive graphics earlier in this space).

And here is “so _ many _ a _ second” (http://smas.studioludens.com/), a project that allows you to visualise some data that will reach out to you better than seeing the same information as just a number.

The Web site allows you to visualise the data for only one item or you can use the split screen view to compare the data for two items.

A telling example is visualising the rate of new mobile phone purchases to new PCs sold (27 per second versus 9 per second).

And figure this: In India more people access the Internet through the mobile phone than from a PC; keep in mind, though, that most of the people who access the Internet through their mobile phones don’t realise that they do so.

You can also create your own visualisation by clicking on “create your own” and providing the statistic and choosing the icon you’d like for your animation.

Here’s a suggestion for the author, Wouter Walmink: why not allow people to upload icons that better reflect the animation they want to see and allowing them to embed the visualisation as a widget in their own Web sites/blogs?

Here’s an idea for a visualisation: the number of Web sites that Nagaraj surfs versus the number of articles that he writes!

Pssst: it is approximately 50 to 1.

N. Nagaraj

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