2cultures.net(.au) » yahoo

Visualizing popularity of Yahoo homepage stories

Nathan Yau — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 08:29:10 +0000

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.

[Yahoo]

Visualizing Yahoo email processing in real-time

Nathan Yau — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 04:13:27 +0000

Hundreds of thousands of emails are sent every second, and yet, you wouldn't really know it because there aren't public-facing streams like that of Twitter. Outside your own inbox, how much email is there exactly? Yahoo, in collaboration with information visualization firm Periscopic, shows you how much email they process in real-time with this interactive feature.

The initial view is a world map, and scaled bubbles represent how many emails were currently sent. Hover over continents for user geographic distribution and gigabytes sent.

There's also trending topics from anonymized subject headers via streamgraph. The view is interesting as you can click on sections so that the surrounding streams split, so you get a sense of distribution along with details per keyword. The keyword data, however, isn't all that interesting for the most part. You'll see keywords such as online, free, and nights. Not too meaningful. There are a few exceptions though like Oprah and wars.

There is also an option to include spam keywords with equally generic terms.

Finally, if you go back to the map and keep on clicking, you eventually get to some fun facts about email, such as there are over sextillion ways to spell Viagra.

All in all, it's a comprehensive view of how much email Yahoo handles that's fun to poke around. Turn on your speakers for playful sound effects.

[Visualizing Yahoo! Mail]

The importance of critical informaiton studies and the digital enclosure

safiyanoble — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 00:38:33 +0000

Public, non-profit attempts for universal Wi-Fi have been attempted as a counter proposal to private ownership. Yet, the resources available to build infrastructure (e.g., Googleplexes) is difficult competition. The ability for the public to engage so deeply in these technologies is correlated to its affordances. Alternatives that allow affordances without such sacrifice of privacy, surveillance and loss of data control is what Andrejevic argues should prevail. Digital enclosures are regimes of power and control over users, rather than sources of freedom and autonomy and continue to be contested.

How Dare You Steal My Data–and then Abandon It!

Cathy Davidson — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 11:44:47 +0000

I personally think this Delicious failure is a bad thing--but it is useful at this particular transitional point because it reminds us that the cloud is not, intrinsically, our friend. The cloud is a highly commercialized entity that holds our data for as long as it finds it useful or profitable to do so and that means, like that country and western song, it can abandon us when our data no longer suits its own particular needs. and desires

Episode 37 – Material Culture

admin — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:40:32 +0000

Aside from the technical challenges of moving museums online, there’s the cultural challenge of squaring the curator’s focus on the actual, authentic object with the free-for-all, non-hierarchical nature of the web. That’s the tension addressed in the feature story on this episode, a follow-up to concerns expressed at the Smithsonian 2.0 conference. We’re lucky to be joined in the discussion by Sharon Leon, Director of Public Projects at the Center for History and New Media. In the news roundup, we assemble our own stimulus package, talk about Creative Commons on the White House website, look at the impact of Gmail going offline, and debate a possible change to Wikipedia’s moderation policy. Picks include a new grant, Omeka training, museum awards, and (despite protests by Mills) a Twitter client.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
Broadband, Computers Part of Stimulus Package
Wikipedia Co-Founder Calls for Major New Moderation Policy
New White House Copyright Policy
Smithsonian 2.0
National Postal Museum’s Arago website
Best of the Web at the Museums and the Web 2009 meeting
Digging into Data Challenge
TweetDeck
Omeka Workshops
Gmail Goes Offline

Running time: 45:14
Download the mp3

Episode 30 – Live From Egypt!

admin — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:53:19 +0000

On this episode we were lucky to have a live link to Alexandria, Egypt, for Wikimania 2008, the international meeting of those who work on Wikipedia and related open collaborative projects. In the feature segment we talk with Liam Wyatt of Wikipedia Weekly, who gives an insider’s scoop of the issues, debates, and future of Wikipedia. In the news roundup we discuss Yahoo’s new open search service, BOSS, and Google’s new virtual world, Lively, among other things. Picks of the week include some advice from Google’s blogs, some rich web-based applications, and Gmail power user tweaks.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
Wikimania 2008
Wikipedia Weekly
Yahoo BOSS
Google Lively
Aviary
Google Labs Gmail tweaks
Requesting reconsideration using Google Webmaster Tools
Technologies Behind Google Ranking

Running time: 48:03
Download the .mp3

Episode 21 – To Read or Not To Read

admin — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 16:44:20 +0000

Is reading declining in the digital age, or is it simply changing? The Digital Campus team is joined by two guests in our feature segment, Sunil Iyengar of the National Endowment for the Arts and Matt Kirschenbaum of the University of Maryland, to debate the future of reading—and its past. The news roundup covers Microsoft’s courtship of Yahoo and what it means (if anything) for campuses, provides an update on a problematic U.S. House of Representatives bill, and covers the new Horizon Report on digital technologies that will affect universities in the coming five years.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
2008 Horizon Report
College Opportunity and Affordability Act
Aluka
Today’s Front Pages at the Newseum
Amistad Digital Resource

Running time: 50:49
Download the .mp3