Forest and the Trees » Other sites

PatientsLikeMe (where I work)

Doug — Wed, 26 May 2010 17:32:17 +0000

I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while. But, looks like infosthetics beat me to it. I’ve been working at PatientsLikeMe for about a year – first consulting and now full time. PatientsLikeMe is a social media site for people w/ serious diseases. There are currently eight main disease communities: ALS, Epilepsy, Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue System, HIV/AIDS, Mood Conditions (Anxiety, Bipolar, Depression, OCD, PTSD), MS, Parkinson’s, and Organ Transplants. I’m making charts. It’s awesome. I really believe we’re making a difference in people’s lives and contributing to medical discovery. Please take a look at the very nice infosthetics post about us to learn more. I’ll try to start posting more about what we’re doing soon.

Data Posters

Doug — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:40:07 +0000

Nathan over at flowingdata is now selling posters. They’re cool. And you should give him money just for maintaining his excellent blog.

If you like data posters, history shots is cool too.

Info/Data Design Link Dump

Doug — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 11:18:31 +0000

Bill Scott’s presentation on designing web interfaces is great. I’ll be buying his book. (via DashboardSpy)

I just ran across datavisualization.ch. Add it to your must reads (along w/ infosthetics and flowing data. And so many more.)

Spent some time going through this flickr set.

And watched this video of Manuel Lima from Visual Complexity.

Also, there’s a Flex Data Visualization contest.

Holy shit. It appears people actually (finally, thank god) care about data visualization. For the first time, I don’t think you can keep track of all the examples (and still have time for work). I remember when Public APIs hit that point maybe 3 or 4 years ago. Exciting.

idgit.org

Doug — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 19:32:33 +0000

After doing the trailer for the FlashForward awards (which I lost – I can only assume the judges were Swedish), I remembered how fun it is to make useless Flash animations. You don’t have to worry about user behavior. You can add music. Big initial downloads don’t matter (although findr personal sure has that). So, I’ve re-launched an old url of mine (idgit.org) where I used to post Flash experiments. I went through some old files – and cleaned up and posted one. (more soon, hopefully)

What does this have to do with data visualization? Uh, not much. But, it does use the drawing api.

tagtree, findr Update

Doug — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 13:05:13 +0000

I made a new version of findr – findr personal. It loads all of a single flickr user’s pictures and creates a tag structure. Unfortunately, the initial load is painfully slow (a separate query is called to get each pic’s tags). But, there are advantages to having all the data – for example, you know how many pictures relate to each tag.

I also fixed some bugs and added a couple features, including a link to flickr’s slide show player. In certain situations, the slide player may not exactly match what you are viewing in findr but usually it will work just fine. (flickr’s slide player doesn’t load 99 pics at once, support all type of sorting, or allow for a startPage param – or maybe it does, but I couldn’t figure it out).

Also – just to confuse matters, I’ve set up a new site, tagtree.net, for all of these tag based experiments. (I’m calling the tag navigation part of findr a tagtree.) I updated findr and findr advanced on this site, but, findr personal only lives on tagtree. Eventually, I’ll probably just set up a re-direct from here. I’m not positive starting a new site is a good idea, but whatever.

tagtree.net
findr personal
findr
findr advanced