Yahoo is not what it used to be, but many parts of it are still alive and well. In a follow-up to their email interactive, Yahoo, along with visualization firm Periscopic, explores the popularity of articles that appear on the Yahoo homepage. It’s a visualization that shows activity within the Content Optimization and Relevance Engine (C.O.R.E. for short).

The focus is on the center, which has the same layout as that of the stories on the Yahoo homepage. Story on top, and ....]]> We’re excited to say that our latest visualization is also being featured on FlowingData.com. Take a look:

Yahoo is not what it used to be, but many parts of it are still alive and well. In a follow-up to their email interactive, Yahoo, along with visualization firm Periscopic, explores the popularity of articles that appear on the Yahoo homepage. It’s a visualization that shows activity within the Content Optimization and Relevance Engine (C.O.R.E. for short).

The focus is on the center, which has the same layout as that of the stories on the Yahoo homepage. Story on top, and links to more stories on the bottom. Except in the interactive, you can see demographics of those who viewed the story. The slider on the bottom lets you go back up to 24 hours to see what was hot during each hour.

It gets more fun when you use the buttons on the left and right to view popular stories among age and gender cohorts and button on the right that let you see stories by categories. The rotating particles, each representing a clickable story, in the background provide a final flourish.

Oh, and extra nerd points for HTML5.

You can see the whole post on flowingdata.com

Yahoo! recently released a dedicated data visualization website [yahoo.com] to highlight their Content Optimization and Relevance Engine (C.O.R.E.), a service that aims to personalize the Yahoo! experience depending on a collection of demographic (e.g. gender and age) and geographic (e.g. cities) variables, in combination with personal interests (e.g. Finance, Sports, Health).

The visualization, developed by Periscopic, allows to explore the relevant content of their homepage according to a set of user-selected parameters, so that one can solve questions like: “What is the most popular story for females between 18 and ....]]> Our latest data visualization is featured on Infosthetics.com.  Here’s an excerpt:

Yahoo! recently released a dedicated data visualization website [yahoo.com] to highlight their Content Optimization and Relevance Engine (C.O.R.E.), a service that aims to personalize the Yahoo! experience depending on a collection of demographic (e.g. gender and age) and geographic (e.g. cities) variables, in combination with personal interests (e.g. Finance, Sports, Health).

The visualization, developed by Periscopic, allows to explore the relevant content of their homepage according to a set of user-selected parameters, so that one can solve questions like: “What is the most popular story for females between 18 and 24?”. The shown content reaches back up to 24 hours ago. Each separate story can be further analyzed in terms of popularity over time, plus its demographic reach of the audience that actually clicked on it. Notably, the floating 3D globe of particles consists of news stories.

You can see the whole post on infosthetic.com

Yahoo has launched a new webpage that visualizes what’s happening on the web in near real time — and it’s totally beautiful.

The Content Optimization Relevance Engine (C.O.R.E.) HTML5 site hopes to show users the “behind the scenes” process Yahoo uses to match readers with content on their personalized homepage, using technology developed in a Yahoo research lab a few years ago. While Yahoo’s homepage used to be arranged by editors, it now uses an algorithm to match individual user preferences.

“We can provide users with insights through the ....]]> Our latest data visualization is featured on Mashable.com. Here’s an excerpt:

Yahoo has launched a new webpage that visualizes what’s happening on the web in near real time — and it’s totally beautiful.

The Content Optimization Relevance Engine (C.O.R.E.) HTML5 site hopes to show users the “behind the scenes” process Yahoo uses to match readers with content on their personalized homepage, using technology developed in a Yahoo research lab a few years ago. While Yahoo’s homepage used to be arranged by editors, it now uses an algorithm to match individual user preferences.

“We can provide users with insights through the lens of the 700 million users that come to our site each month,” Todd Beaupre, Yahoo’s senior director of product management, personalization and social platforms, told Mashable.

The interactive site optimizes content discovery, showing you what’s popular for a variety of user demographics, such as U.S. city, gender, age and interest (news, finance, lifestyle, Yahoo’s entertainment, sports and health). You can also chose a number of these characteristics at once, such as female sports fans in Cleveland or 35- to 44-year-olds in Atlanta.

As far as utility goes, you can think of the site as a tool to provide similar insight to Twitter trending topics or Google trends.

You can check out the whole article on their site.

In case you missed the enhanced broadcast, we’ve included screencaps of the images below.

Overall, it was really nice to see the White House using technology to help better explain the often confusing nuances of politics. They produced an enhanced broadcast last year, but this year’s version felt much more considered and visually appealing.

Of course we would have liked to see more ....]]> The White House billed the 2012 State of the Union address as the “most interactive State of the Union ever”, and part of their efforts was an “enhanced broadcast” that included a large amount of charts, graphs and images.

In case you missed the enhanced broadcast, we’ve included screencaps of the images below.

Overall, it was really nice to see the White House using technology to help better explain the often confusing nuances of politics. They produced an enhanced broadcast last year, but this year’s version felt much more considered and visually appealing.

Of course we would have liked to see more data-inspired images, but there were several different data presentation methods, a good selection of type faces and images, and a cameo by Pac-Man. What’s not to like?

Here’s a set of images that we captured, as they were shown. Click for larger versions.

Let us know if we missed anything.

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Their article, Data Swims Upstream, is an interview with Periscopic co-founder Dino Citraro and highlights our sustainability efforts, our creative process, and the role we see data visualization playing in a world of information overload.

Here’s an excerpt:

In general, data visualizations deal with facts. Sometimes they can be manipulated to support a specific point of view, but for the most part, the raw data lets you take an objective look at what’s actually going on, and then draw a conclusion.

Unfortunately, things are becoming so cloudy now, especially in legislative ....]]> We’re honored to be featured in the February issue of Print Magazine.

Their article, Data Swims Upstream, is an interview with Periscopic co-founder Dino Citraro and highlights our sustainability efforts, our creative process, and the role we see data visualization playing in a world of information overload.

Here’s an excerpt:

In general, data visualizations deal with facts. Sometimes they can be manipulated to support a specific point of view, but for the most part, the raw data lets you take an objective look at what’s actually going on, and then draw a conclusion.

Unfortunately, things are becoming so cloudy now, especially in legislative discourse where people are just completely distorting the facts, or in some cases, just making things up—to a point where it’s very easy to be confused and not know what to think. And I don’t think that’s a result of people being unable to understand the information, it’s a result of information overload. People are just too willing to invent things these days. But that lack of respect for objectivity is countered by data transparency, and the rise of data visualizations.

The current issue is on the newsstands now, and we encourage you to check it out. It’s a great magazine and full of many good articles.  If you’re interested in our interview, you can check out the images below, and also take a look at the PDF version.

As an added bonus, here’s one bit of the interview that didn’t fit, but that we feel is still important:

Is there anything that you think would be helpful in getting people to recognize their impact on the environment?

When you look into this, you come to see that it’s really, really complex. Every action you have is tied to so many other actions. Even when you try to do good, you may actually be supporting something that has a negative impact without even knowing. There are so many factors that are related to the decisions that we make on a daily basis, so many connections that get made, so many actions and reactions, that it would be impossible to see all of the relationships at once and draw a conclusion. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. You have to take a step, right? You have to keep moving forward. You just have to do your best at calculating which direction is forward.

To tease some of the truth from all of that overwhelming information—even if it’s only in a small way—that’s what we’re trying to do with our data visualizations.

So here it is, in all of its cryptic beauty.

It’s simple, really.

(And that’s drawn on our conference table, which is sometimes also part of the process.)

Our second kiosk, Flipbook Station, allows you to capture frames of video an turn them into a physical flipbook, emulating the ....]]> We recently developed the software for two kiosks being used at the swankily newly renovated Museum of Moving Image in New York City. The first one teaches visitors about stop-motion animation and lets you create a short movie. The visitor uses visual assets provided at the stations, moving the elements slightly then capturing an individual frame. The resulting film can be played back and adjusted. The final film can then be emailed or uploaded directly to YouTube.

Our second kiosk, Flipbook Station, allows you to capture frames of video an turn them into a physical flipbook, emulating the early days of film. The visitor stands in front of a video camera which can be zoomed and tilted accordingly. It then captures images at a slow rate from the video. It then plays back the 5-second animation. The flipbook videos are prominently (and sometimes embarrassingly) displayed on a screen near the exit of the museum (thereby prompting visitors to go to the gift shop prior to departure). The flipbooks are printed and cut by a professional card printer and assembled for taking home.

This past week, our CEO and founder Kim Rees stopped by the museum for a visit and sent along this animation she created.

We’re still trying to figure out the many hidden meanings it undoubtedly contains.

After watching a few of the Republican Primary debates we were compelled to try to make sense of what everyone was actually saying.  To do this, we decided to take a look at the words that were most often spoken during the debate, and then map to them to both the major issues, as well as the candidates from which they ....]]> As you know, we are fans (as well as purveyors) of data visualization. What you might not know is that we are also fans of politics, and our latest data visualization Politilines is a nice blending of the two.

After watching a few of the Republican Primary debates we were compelled to try to make sense of what everyone was actually saying.  To do this, we decided to take a look at the words that were most often spoken during the debate, and then map to them to both the major issues, as well as the candidates from which they came.

A look at our process
To do this we gathered the debate transcripts from the American Presidency Project at UCSB and started parsing from there.

For every question asked of the candidates we segmented the transcript into a unique section, and from there we were able to tag each answer with the relevant issues.

The questions were categorized by hand for each debate, with each question having the potential of being associated with one or more issues. We discarded any non-issue related answers, such as a candidate asking for more time or other casual conversations.

After all of the questions were categorized, we removed any words that failed to give insight into the identified issue topics, such as “the”, “although”, “while”, “etc.” and other common stop words.

During our initial exploration we simply displayed the words that were spoken most often, and used that as the basis of the visualization. While that was interesting, it lacked content and context. When a candidate said “foreign” we weren’t able to identify whether they were talking about foreign people, or foreign aid, or something else.

To make the tool more useful, we then analyzed the transcripts by looking for common groups of words, like “United States”, “foreign aid”, “Federal Reserve” and others. Through this method we found much more insights into what the candidates were saying about the specific issues. It revealed groupings like “9 percent” and “health care.”

This is our Beta release of Politilines. In future releases we hope to add context for the frequency of the words spoken by each candidate, an analysis of the word’s intent, the ability to remove candidates or words, and a way to explore the most common words and issues in all of the debates.

The result right now is a pleasant little tool that allows you to draw connections in ways that watching in realtime, or reading a transcript, might not reveal. Check it out for yourself.  We hope you feel the same way.

Bonus tech note: Politilines was developed in HTML5.

We’d love to know what you think.  Please drop us a line, or leave a comment below. If you have a suggestion for a feature to incorporate into a future release, don’t be shy.  We’d love to hear it.

Great lineup of speakers, including Nate Bergey (where can we buy an ISS-Notify?), Kevin Lynagh, Charlie Loyd, Aaron Parecki, and Periscopic co-founder, Dino Citraro.

Special thanks to Second Story for sponsoring the event!

Looking forward to talking shop with like-minded  data-heads.

The Yahoo! Mail Visualization , designed by Periscopic, aims to show of the network processing power required to run a vast emailing service by revealing the streams of keywords that are sent around the globe in real-time.

The geo-located circles on the world map represent the activity and volume of processed emails, totaling to about 5.6 billion emails a day. Current and predicted email traffic is show at the bottom of the screen. A streamgraph shows the top 10 keywords ....]]> Many thanks to Andrew at Infosthetics.com for posting about our latest data visualization. Here’s an excerpt from his post:

The Yahoo! Mail Visualization , designed by Periscopic, aims to show of the network processing power required to run a vast emailing service by revealing the streams of keywords that are sent around the globe in real-time.

The geo-located circles on the world map represent the activity and volume of processed emails, totaling to about 5.6 billion emails a day. Current and predicted email traffic is show at the bottom of the screen. A streamgraph shows the top 10 keywords used in email subject lines over the last 5 minutes (at least from those countries that have no strict privacy laws). Both views allow for zooming into specific continents, and for filtering the spam from the non-spam email (which actually occur to a ratio of 1 to 4). Additional infographic illustrations further explain the email filtering processes.

You can see the whole post on Infosthetics.com