WikiDashboard

This is really cool.

One of the great things about Wikipedia is that you can see who has made edits: this makes the process of accumulation transparent - in theory. In practice, it's often too hard to see the wood for the trees.

Enter WikiDashboard, which offers a visual representation of the editing process:

The idea is that if we provide social transparency and enable attribution of work to individual workers in Wikipedia, then this will eventually result in increased credibility and trust in the page content, and therefore higher levels of trust in Wikipedia.

It's dead easy to use: you just bung in your search term, and the relevant Wikipedia page appears (from a mirror), alongside with a neat graphic that shows who did what when. (Via All the Modern Things.)

This is What the Internet Was Invented For

Who needs television, when you've got WikipediaVision?

WikipediaVision is a visualization of edits to the English (and the German, French, Spanish) Wikipedia, almost the same time as they happen.

Be warned, this is totally addictive. (Via if:book.)

Visualising the Net

I live on the Net - well, almost. I certainly like to think of myself as a citizen of that strange, disembodied place. And as such, I welcome ways of thinking about the landscape I inhabit virtually.

And along comes Akamai, one of the best-kept secrets in that land, with something splendid:

20% of the world's Internet traffic is delivered over the Akamai platform. We combine this global scope with constant data collection to construct an accurate and comprehensive picture of what's happening on the Internet. Bookmark this page to check the world's online behavior at any given moment -- How fast is data moving? Where's the most congestion? What events are causing spikes in Web activity?

Previously, only Akamai and our customers had access to this information. Now we're opening that window into the online universe.

Don't miss the wonderful real-time monitor, which shows you things like traffic, latency and attacks in your area. Fascinating.

Visualising DRM

Having problems getting your head around that tricky concept of DRM? Try this. (Via Boing Boing.)

All A-Twitter About Twittervision

I am not a Twitterer, but I am the sad kind of person who enjoys watching defragmentation utilities as they bring order to my hard disc chaos. So it's perhaps no surprise that I find Twittervision utterly engrossing:

What is Twittervision?
A real-time geographic visualization of posts to Twitter. Samuel Morse, meet Carl Jung.

What makes Twittervision so compelling for me is that it is like eavesdropping on the whole world, as random thoughts bubble up hither and thither. It's also an extremely cool mashup, as Twitter posts pop up in their respective geographic positions, and the world-map shifts constantly in a vain attempt to keep up.

Wonderful (via Virtual China.)

On the Social Use of Visualisations

I'm a sucker for anything meta, so I find these meta-analyses of data irresistible. The article is mainly about IBM's Many Eyes, but also mentions Swivel, which I've written about before, and Data360, which I haven't. The more the merrier, say I.

Problems We Don't Have: Tag Clouds in Chinese

You think you have problems with Web 2.0? Be grateful for small mercies:

Tag cloud displays tags in a website which emphasize some of the tags by showing them with larger font sizes, and/or in darker colors. Moreover, tags in a tag cloud are usually arranged in alphabetical order. Tag cloud seems to work in the English world as a means of visualization as well as an extra means of navigation - what about in the Chinese world or more specifically, what about in Hong Kong?

(Via Virtual China.)