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With the world caught up in Obama mania today, I thought it only appropriate to do an inauguration-related post. You might say, I too had a “Barack attack.” ; )
The proclamations of “history in the making” and invocations of former Presidents got me thinking about a neat way to visually compare Obama’s inauguration address to those past. Some people may remember my visual analysis of the eight years of Bush; this is a bit different. Using IBM’s ManyEyes social media visualization tool, I’ve compiled a Wordle (stylized tag cloud) comparison of Obama’s address to those of Presidents to whom he is often compared. Note particular similarities to JFK and FDR (more visualizations after the jump).
I’ve been looking into new ways that people can use mobile devices. Both Google and Apple have offered big prizes for people who develop applications for their Android and iPhone platforms. There are lots of location-aware applications that offer immediate access to information that’s relevant to wherever you happen to be, but they’re all pretty drab in their execution. Except for Enkin.
Enkin is a mapping system that bridges the digital and real worlds. Typical mapping applications show a bird’s eye view whatever location is being investigated. What Enkin does is something called “Live Mode”, which provides an overlay of rich digital information that you use when you look at anything. That probably isn’t very clear, so check out the movie. Skip to about 2:40 for the really cool stuff:
I was just loading up Google maps to figure out where to meet a friend when I noticed a new feature: community uploaded photos, and Wikipedia location tagging.
Ok, personal banking information is about as private as it gets right? Wrong. Turns out, bloggers like this, this, this, this , this, this, this, and this are sharing their personal finances and net worth with anyone who cares to read about it. For example, the author of the The Money Blog posts a bar chart of their net worth on every page of their site ($257,939 as of May 9th, 2009 in case anyone was curious).
It’s one thing to share information about what music you’re listening to via a widget, but would people really use a widget to display financial information? Well, 23% of people are apparently interested in having a widget that could display the current balance from their bank account.
Organizing the rapidly growing information available on the web has been dramatically eased through the use of tagging where individuals label and organize digital data to their own preference rather than relying on pre determined classification systems.
Researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed a way to bring this classification system into the physical world. The best part is - the tagging is done automatically. By attaching a tiny camera and LCD screen to a pair of oversized glasses, researchers have created the ‘cyber goggles’ that automatically scan what the user sees and identify objects in real time.
