Finally, Twitter Explained

If you’re among the many who just don’t “get” Twitter–show of hands, please? You, sir, in the back?–there’s finally a good, simple explanation.

Lee LeFever, whose Commoncraft studio makes clear, loveably brief videos that explain social networking tools to layfolk–has released “Twitter in Plain English.” It manages, in only 2:29 (!), to convey what Twitter does and why you (may) want to be involved.

We won’t make the mistake of trying to explain a video that explains something so clearly. But we will say the videos use a mix of whiteboard, ink-and-paper drawings and advanced finger-puppet technology. If the MacArthur “genius” grant people took nominations, we’d put in for LeFever & Co.

If you want to figure out what all the Twitterfuss is about, just watch the video.

Or send it to your mom. Or boss.

If any of them actually winds up spending time on Twitter, of course, I’ll dodge responsibility. It’s LeFever’s fault.

More Dataviz: Microsoft’s “Blews” Project

I came across this recent item on Microsoft’s “Blews” dataviz project, still in the lab, which visualizes how news items are linked to from the left- and right-leaning blogosphere–and shows how much “heat” each item generates.

Freaky Dataviz: NYTimes’s “Ebb and Flow”

I confess an irrational love for dataviz. A properly done data visualization can be brilliant and beautiful–a graphic representation that does more than words, photos, videos or flat graphics to explain some aspect of “reality.”

An excellent web dataviz makes you say “Oh, I get it” after even a brief glance.

A perfect one also is so beautiful you want to spend time just clicking and admiring–and, as you do, your understanding deepens.

One of my favorite examples: Digg Labs’ “Stack” real-time visualizer of users’ diggs. Ignore the fact that Digg content and users have an unsavory quality. The point is the Tetris-like dataviz shows what content is being recommend, and how frequently, in real time. If you want to dig deep you can click through to the articles that are stacking up.

So it’s with a mixed sense of awe and bafflement I regard The New York Times’ “The Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts 1986-2007.”

It intends to show how hundreds of movies performed at the box office over 20 years. It’s gorgeous and unsettling, a thing to behold and ponder. It suggests the botanical metaphor for the male never seen in Georgia O’Keeffe paintings. Or a flayed trachea. Or maybe some  crustacean group housing complex you come across while snorkeling and flipper away from real fast.

She shame is, it’s hard to figure out.

Some movies that made less money are shown as peaks higher than those who made more. See “I am Legend” and “National Treasure.” This has to do with the difference between weekly and total box office revenue, but I had to work really hard to figure that one out.

There appears to be no logic to whether a movie is rendered above or below center, though the mind expects some connection.  It’s not quality of movie per the Times review; I checked.

To be fair, spend enough time with the Ebb and Flow and you come to understand, with visuals not words, a few worthy observations about box office behavior:

• Blockbusters tend to hit hard and fade into a skinny long tail
• Some movies that do poorly in total box office (Little Miss Sunshine) have more staying power than high-grossers (Evan Almighty, to use a Steve Carrell comparison, which peaked and petered).
• Okay, it’s no surprise, but the movies that do the best box office around the time of their release are summer and holiday fare.

Anyway: Ebb and Flow is a beautiful and ambitious dataviz. It does remind me of a  phenomenon from my days in words-on-paper journalism, however, which makes it a good cautionary tale for those who undertake dataviz projects.
Back in the day, an editor and reporter would get all excited about a story, sell it around the newsroom, do lots of reporting, work all the sources, gather some slam-bang quotes and cool facts, craft a great narrative and then realize. . .well, there isn’t much story there.

It never stopped the words-and-paper journalists from publishing. It probably shouldn’t stop the datavisualists either.

Atlantic.com: They Get It, They Really Get It!

The Atlantic, the magazine that is rarely described without the adjective “venerable,” has undergone an astonishing web rebirth–or, rather, series of rebirths.

I don’t mean they’ve gone on the web. They did that a long time ago. I mean they’ve gotten the web.

The magazine (which, with its we’re-doing-it-meta-so-we’re-not-really-pandering cover story on Britney Spears is perhaps trying to earn the adjective “venereal”) has updated is website three times in the past year. Each time it’s gotten better–more web-savvy, more accessible and less self-infatuated.

With its first re-do in August 2007 (for which I gave it this fanny-slam), it retained its dead-from-the-neck-up policy of asking readers to pay to read the full text of the best articles that appeared in the magazine. It also pretty much kept readers out of the game entirely, sticking with the other dead-from-the-neck-up policy of pushing material to web readers but hardly letting them talk back. Smug.

A few months ago the Atlantic website was re-iterated, guillotining the pay-to-play policy and letting readers romp a bit–adding a not-very-venerably-named “Hot Reads” box of most read, commented, etc.,  splaying out an excess of thinky blogs on the home page, and opening up to reader comments.

And this month a new iteration takes the website into the new world almost fully. Its new section, named The Current, features

• Three blissfully short contributions daily, navigable by calendar
• Links to “best opinion”–off-site
• Comments galore–including a Post and Riposte forum section
• Smartly curated related-content links, both off- and on-site
• Free access to back-issue (and related web-only) content back to 1995 (for issues before that, you still have to pay)
• Continuation of the high-cranial blogs, some of which now integrate multimedia

I could pick nits, but won’t. The Atlantic has demonstrated one of the most important concepts of web development–repeated iteration and continuous improvement. I suspect more improvements will come, but already the website has cleared a very high bar.

Who knows? Someday people may refer to theatlantic.com itself as “venerable.”

Google vs. Microsoft at the Health 2.0 Spring Fling