How do we visualize cyberspace?  For all of the serendipitous surprises the web has to offer, it’s ironic that the traditional metaphors for cyberspace are about as appealing as a rush-hour traffic jam (”information superhighway” anyone?).  Ah, but the web is so much more than an electronic pileup of bits and bytes!  Looking for a little visual pick-me-up, this week’s Friday Five sent us spelunking for some of the more interesting and entertaining visualizations on the web.  Enjoy!
 

Packet Garden

One of my all-time favorite web apps, Packet Garden allows you to harvest your IP traffic and grow your own personal Internet garden.  As the website explains “To do this, Packet Garden takes note of all the servers you visit, their geographical location and the kinds of data you access. Uploads make hills and downloads valleys, their location determined by numbers taken from internet address itself. The size of each hill or valley is based on how much data is sent or received. Plants are also grown for each protocol detected by the software; if you visit a website, an ‘HTTP plant’ is grown. If you share some files via eMule, a ‘Peer to Peer plant’ is grown, and so on.” A world based on your digital data is born.

Flight Patterns

Whatever else you do today, watch this video.  It’s simply one of the most mesmerizing visualizations you’ll ever see.  Digital artist Aaron Koblin used FAA flight tracking data of aircraft traveling across the United States to create this visually stunning interpretation of globalization.

 Universe

I’ve said in the past that I’m the (unofficial) president of the (unofficial) Jonathan Harris Fan Club, and here’s another reason why.  “Using the metaphor of an interactive night sky, Universe  presents an immersive environment for navigating the world’s contemporary mythology, as found online in global news and information from DayLife. Universe opens with a color-shifting aurora borealis, at the center of which is a moon, and through which thousands of stars slowly move. Each star has a specific counterpart in the physical world - a news story, a quote, an image, a person, a company, a team, a place - and moving the cursor across the star field causes different stars to connect, forming constellations. Any constellation can be selected, making it the center of the universe, and sending everything else into its orbit.”  Like all of Harris’ work, it’s beautifully rendered and brilliantly thought-provoking.

TwitterVision 3D

Sometimes it feels that Twitter has turned the world into an “endlessly chattering global family.” The micro-blogging site has nearly quadrupled its user base in the last nine months, registering over 900,000 members.  Where are all those Tweets coming from? The 3D version of TwitterVision gives you a pretty good idea: it visualizes random Twitter posts from around the world in all of their profound and mundane glory.  Created by Dave Troy, Twittervision is part of the new MoMA exhibit Design and the Elastic Mind.

3D Mailbox

OK, this one’s just for fun. 3D Mailbox has a seemingly impossible mission: Make email fun.  The program turns your email program into a simulation of LAX airport traffic. From the site: “Every email you send or receive is represented by a jumbo jet. New email comes to the arrivals terminal, or to custom hangars (mailboxes) that you define… departing mails leave via the departures terminal. Based on the origin or destination of your mail, each message is depicted by any of over 80 world airlines. Get a message from the UK, it comes by Virgin, British Airways. Send a message to Italy, it goes out on Alitalia or EuroFly. Emails with attachments are carried by the couriers: FedEx, UPS, DHL, and CargoLux.” While the program has gotten its share of mixed reviews (primarily from tech analysts who perhaps take email a bit too seriously), the video trailer alone is worth a look.  And yes, that’s “Spam Air” in the picture above.

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Highlights from PICNIC ‘07, the tech/media conference held in Amsterdam last week:?

My New Hero: Hacker Pablos Holman. Bouncing around the stage in his black jeans, grunge tshirt and pony tail, Holman looked more like a tall 10 year old with ADD than a serious techhead. Espousing the hacker ethos (”ordinary people look at a device and think ‘what can I do with this?’ while hackers look at a device and think ‘what can I make it do?’) he showed off some of his favorite hacks: remote controlling a hotel tv set to get free movies and see what fellow hotel guests are surfing online; “Hackerbot”, a robot on wheels which drives up to people with open wifi and displays their passwords; and the crowd favorite: hacking into Cory Doctorow’s cell phone live on stage by spoofing his voicemail (Cory, who was in the audience, looked mildly amused).

My New Favorite Term: “Minimally Invasive Education”, courtesy of Prof. Sugata Mitra, creator of the “Hole in the Wall” project. In 1999 Mitra, an Indian physicist, placed a computer in the hole of the cement wall that separated his high-tech office with an urban slum. The result: children from the slum self-taught themselves to use the computer without the help of teachers, schools or textbooks. Over the years Mitra has replicated the experiment across India, proving that perhaps the only thing needed to bridge the digital divide are some inquisitive 8 year olds. (see this great post by Bruno Giussani about Mitra’s work from the LIFT ‘07 conference earlier this year)

My Still-All-time-Favorite Digital Artist: Jonathan Harris, whose work continues to inspire and provoke. In his latest digital incarnation, Harris turns his signature pulse-taking lens on himself (literally): The Whale Hunt is a photographic heartbeat of 3214 images, documenting the spring 2007 Inupiat Eskimo whale hunt in Barrow, Alaska.