Geo-visualisation and visualisation is becoming more main-stream with media publications creating more and more great visualisations. The New York times have been releasing a constant stream of great geo visualisations, they even have their own visualisation lab on the NYT site. (I’ve also notice that the Guardian has their own http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog also.) Last week the NY Times released an interactive mashup featuring the popularity of Netflix rental across several cities in US.

Using the mashup, you change look change the titles and see the rental popularity of the movie across different zipcodes. Its a great mashup to bring interactivity to data.

I discovered that one of the authors Matthew Bloch has a blog page with all list of the visualisation he’s created for NY Times. Wow, what a great selection of visualisations!

Here’s a sample of my favourite visualisations.


2008 Election results – Obama vs McCain


US Movie Revenue popularity


US Inflation breakdown

Hopefully, as data is becoming more open, we’ll see more Geo-visualisations in New Zealand.

I spent a bit of time over the Xmas break using the iPhone for reading webpages. I’m hooked on using Google FastFlip as a way to flick through the top blogs and news sites like Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat and BBC News. Unfortunately, I discovered how really sucky browsing webpages from a mobile device is. I’m not sure what the percentage of mobile browsers on visiting site is like for the blog / news site, but I’m sure that its growing audience and the experience is far from ideal at the moment.

I’ve come up with a list of wishes that I would like for see get nailed over this year. (These suggestions are not just for iPhone but for all mobile web devices)

1) Automagic website layout engine for mobile web

A couple weeks ago, I discovered Readability, the page re-formating tool that can dynamically format webpages via a javascript bookmarklet (thanks to Lance Wiggs for the link). It was a revelation. Readability removes the clutter and distractions from the a page to just give you a page designed for reading.

Readability is designed for a normal browser not the iPhone. I did a bit of digging and found that someone has found out how to get it working on iPhone – How to get Readability on iPhone

It requires a little bit of yak shaving to get it working. (I promise only a bit of cut and pasting) So far it’s working on 99% of the pages I’ve looked at it and its a lot nicer to us.

The only downside is that I have to load the original page before switching to the Readability template.

Here’s how it looks on iPhone

Original Page

Original Page with zooming

Page with Readability applied

Readability works so well on iPhone that it got me thinking…. Surely there is a way to create a javascript library that would be able to re-format a webpage to work on a mobile device automatically. And it would be able to take into account more simplified navigational and advertising components. So then anyone with a blog can install the javascript and css on their site and be “mobile” ready. This give the content owners control over how their content is going to be viewed. Otherwise, we’ll move the content until we can see what we want.

Wish 1 – A Plugin for styling webpages for Mobile content – I’m sure that there are some clever jQuery hackers that can take the Readability approach and create a javascript library to detect and mobile device and re-factor the layout automagically.

UPDATE: It looks like Instapaper does a lot of what I want – its a mix of Delicious and Readability in that it allows you to download pages on the iPhone to read them offline and it has a mobile template for reading. Looks interesting.

2) Speed and Page Size for website.

Web pages have to be optimised for mobile devices!

I have “grazing” browser behaviour on phone that means I’m sample small bits from a number of pages. S0 I will leave open pages in the browser and re-open them after switching in and around different apps. What I have noticed is that majority of webpages have to completely reload AGAIN. The iPhone doesn’t cache any web objects (html, css , js and images ) over 15K ! (It used to cache 25K but testing has shown that its only caching 15K objects. )

Blog / news pages are often from 100 – 500K. On 3G, the page loading speed is painful. Webpages need to be optimised for web device. I’m not so worried about wasting bandwidth, more so that if its loads slowly, I’ll switch to something else. The iPhone has allowed me to consume the web in byte sized chunks, I want to quick graze not “queue” up for pages.

Optimisation tools that create packaging of CSS / Javascript and Image Spriting will need to have “mobile” settings to take into account of the mobile cache limitations.

iPhone Browsing tip from iPhone caching article

“Tapping the reload icon in the address bar sends unconditional requests for all components, without the If-Modified-Since header and ignoring the Expires header. So to speed up your browsing, refresh the page by tapping the address bar and then tapping GO, don’t use the refresh icon.
“

Wish 2 – Standards for the webpages for the mobile web. Mobile pages needs to smaller, more focused. The overall page size including ads should only be around 80-100K. Individual components should be less than 15K. Optimisation tools should have output modes – normal and mobile.

3) Merge Fast Flip + Google Reader

Please Google can you integrate Google Reader and Fast Flip. It would make the killer blog reader on iPhone. I use Fast flip all the time. The sheer volume of some of the blogs like techcrunch is far too much for me to handle and as such I normally ignore it. Using fastflip has allowed me to quickly skim over the articles and drill in and read the ones I’m interested in. I’ve found it a great tool for my blog reading, but I have some requests….

• Wish 3.1 Use the FastFlip engine on all my feeds from Google Reader.
• Wish 3.2 Give me the option to only see that pages that I haven’t seen before (not necessarily the one’s that I haven’t read)

UPDATE: Fast Flip is now been integrated into Google News via Fast Company (12/2/10)

The mobile web is getting pretty exciting especially with tools like jQTouch making it easy to make customised UI for mobile sites. We’re going to spend more time on our mobile device, website owners need to optimise our experience to be a joy not a pain in the ass.

We’ve released our first update to the Mapsicle API, version 1.1. Highlights:

• You can now host Mapsicle locally without modifications.
• Mapsicle will resize automatically when put in a variable-sized container. (see at StreetTag)
• You can start Mapsicle without giving a LatLng, and set the position later, like the standard Street View API. (example)
• You can choose which part of your overlay is positioned on top of the target, like iconAnchor in Google Maps. (example)

There are more details in the CHANGELOG, and you can check out the examples or reference.

Just seen this blog post about Augmented Reality – a new interface to search, explore and discover.

The blog post has capture the essence of the potential in Mapsicle.

State of the art augmented reality apps enable you to check out what’s around your current position and put it in context of what you can see in a certain direction – soon we’ll find out what’s around the corner in the same photorealistic way – but without having to walk there if it is not worth it.

Thinking about Mapsicle…

We can virtually explore and use augmented virtual reality as an intuitive real world metaphor for search, exploration and discovery.

Mapsicle can be used to make a number of interactive applications to virtually explore locations. What about an streetview driven kiosk to explore a theme park like Legoland or Disneyland.

We’re entering a new age of mashups powered by streetview based applications.

Want to view your GIS / data layers on Streetview? Talk to us at ProjectX.

Using the library Mapsicle you can create a whole new world of applications using Google maps streetview.

• Advanced Store locators: Create store locators that show exactly how to get to your store from the user’s current location.
• Interactive tours: Combine Street View with content to give tours of the streets of the world.
• Digital signage: Create interactive advertising on Street View using video and images.
• Interactive kiosk: Build a touch screen information kiosk for visitors.
• Games: Build a treasure hunt application or a racing game to drive around Thunderhill raceway

We know how to connect your GIS with Streetview. Whether you have store locations, assets or want to put your companies branding on Streetview, we can help!

We’re looking for clients, who want to make some innovative mashups or want to view their assets using Streetview.

Contact John, if you’re interested in connecting streetview with your data!