How Much Data is Created Every Minute?

How Common Is Your Birthday? | The Daily Viz UPDATE: I’ve written a clarification about this post here. Please read it. A friend posted an interesting data table on my Facebook wall yesterday, which was my birthday. The data listed each day of the year with a ranking for how many babies were born in the United States on each date from 1973 to 1999. Some interesting trends are evident in the data. Apparently, people like to make babies around the winter holiday season because a large proportion of babies are born in September (ours is due Sept. 24, btw). Sept. 16 was most common. Data source: NYTimes.com, Amitabh Chandra, Harvard University

Conor Gaughan: We Are Not Arguing Over Chicken Facebook can feel faceless sometimes. Over the last week, the site has seen a lot of conversations about Chick-fil-A, often among total strangers able to shout at each other just because they happen to have a friend in common. It is worth remembering that behind each unfamiliar headshot or puppy pic is a real person. When you litter your friend's wall with vitriol about the idiocy of your interlocutors, you are talking about people, not pixels. So here's my message to social conservatives: Just because you were a member of the Boy Scouts, I don't think you are a bigot. Have those waffle fries; I'm not going to glitter-bomb you. Hi. Growing up is never easy. When gays get so angry about a chicken sandwich, it is because Chick-fil-A has given around $5 million to fight to discriminate against us. I am your coworker, your frat brother, your cousin, your neighbor. Eat all the chicken sandwiches you want.

Datavisualization.ch Selected Tools Why Social Networks Won't Kill the Blog Elisa Camahort Page is co-founder and COO of BlogHer, Inc., the leading cross-platform media network created by, for and with women social media leaders. Follow her @ElisaC. In the last year, users have turned to social sharing platforms like Pinterest, Tumblr, and Instagram to share bite-sized snacks of content, while relying on blogs to enable longer forms of communication and self-expression. In one sense, it’s become the equivalent of a social media full meal. But, as if on cue, online Cassandras meet this growth in social sites with various visions of social media death. When looking at the data about how these new sharing platforms play, particularly with blogs, it’s more accurate to consider them all to be a blogger's best friend. The move, particularly from text and link-sharing to image-based sharing, has also worked wonders for blogs. That’s because, from baby showers to brilliant quotes, these social sharing platforms represent self-expression writ small.

An Interactive Look at Connected Devices in 2020 [INFOGRAPHIC] Whether it’s the Internet of Things and the rising connectivity among devices, or the use of wireless connections for machine-to-machine applications, you might be considering how this technology affects you and your organization. It’s important to know the sharing of valuable data by devices is expected to become an almost $1 trillion industry by 2020 , according to a report by the Carbon War Room. And in the next seven years, we’ll be measuring the growth in connected devices in more than just dollars. That’s a lot of devices. For organizations employing M2M technology, the benefits may be seen across wide swaths of the business , such as: Machine operators responsible for the uptime of mission-critical assets Finance professionals responsible for calculating the ROI of purchases Procurement team members evaluating the agility of their suppliers Vodafone’s car application in Italy lets auto insurance companies know how much a car is being used so premiums may be charged accordingly.

How Twitter Changed Literature & Culture What's the Latest Development? It is only possible to have clear feelings toward Twitter if you are not on it, argue the editors of the literary magazine n+1. To tweet and re-tweet is to simultaneously involve yourself in a niche world of pedantic mediocrity and stimulating political revolution. One thing that is sure, however, is that it is not your parents' communication medium. "...Beckett wrote, in 1930, that it was every bit as illogical to expect tomorrow’s self to be gratified by today’s experience as it was to expect your hunger to vanish at the sight of your uncle eating a sandwich..." But to what extent has Twitter revolutionized literature? What's the Big Idea? That the Internet is a democratic and democratizing medium is perhaps banal at this point. Photo credit: Shutterstock.com

Stupid Calculations Ray Bradbury wasn’t a digital dinosaur; e-backlist coming Ray Bradbury was right about so many things and spellbinding about so many others that it almost hurts to write this: Ray Bradbury was wrong when it came to reading. But then I also get to tell you this: he changed his mind. HarperCollins is in the midst of preparing its Ray Bradbury backlist for digital publication, paidContent has learned. Bradbury’s longtime editor Jennifer Brehl talked to me about the plans and the author, who died Tuesday because, she said, “I don’t want people to think he was this dinosaur because he had some opinions” that he started to change late in life. The details for the “huge undertaking” are still being worked out but Brehl said plans were well under way with Bradbury’s approval. (I’ve yet to reach Bradbury’s agent Michael Congdon.) She added, “We respected his wishes for so long. For too long, Bradbury equated reading with print Bradbury fretted for decades over what would happen when reading books gave way to screens or was lost to ignorance.

'Murmur' bridges physical and virtual using sound / @chevalvert @v3ga #raspberrypi Created using Raspberry Pi and openFrameworks, Murmur is a device that enables the communication between public and the projection by simulating the movement of sound waves, building a luminous bridge between the physical and the virtual. The device was designed to collect the murmurs of the public. Referred to “echo’s room”, making reference both to the audio effect achieved and to Greek mythology, it represents not only the key technique of the Murmur device, but also its magical aspect, turning sound waves into light waves. The project is a collaboration between Chevalvert, 2Roqs, Polygraphik and Splank. Project Page

Twitter Is the Web's Best Public Identity Service—So Why Is It Destroying Itself? - Robinson Meyer The bigger, civic implications of Twitter breaking up with Tumblr Join Tumblr on Monday (as I did) and you'd mosey through a little process. You'd pick a username, type in a password. Look at blogs the service recommends following. Then you'd get to a page which, a few days ago, would let you search Facebook, Twitter and your email contacts to find Tumblr blogs written by your friends. Join Tumblr today? The move's been roundly rebuked. It was in that month that Edd Dumbill, writing at O'Reily and responding to Google Plus, articulated, in a clean list, exactly what a social network did. Identity -- authenticating you as a user, and storing information about you Sharing -- access rights over content Notification -- informing users of changes to content or contacts' content Annotation -- commenting on content Communication -- direct interaction among members of the system It's that first one which has gotten the most attention in the past year.

The Conversation Prism by Brian Solis and JESS3