Datavisualization Bing Entertainment Brings Full Music Streams To Search, Plus Gam Bing’s iPhone app isn’t the only thing getting an upgrade today at Microsoft’s search engine. Bing is also starting to roll out close to 100 new features to its main search engine on the Web. The biggest change is a new major search category under Bing Entertainment, which will include better ways to search for music, movies, TV shows, and games. “We did travel, health, shopping and local last year,” explains senior VP Yusuf Mehdi. “Now the Web has unlocked all of this entertainment, but for many people they are spending too much time looking for what they want to do instead of enjoying it. Roughly 10 percent of all searches are entertainment related, according to Mehdi. One of the most noticeable changes will come in music. When you search for an artist or a song, a special Answer Box (informally known as the Bing Box) will appear at the top of the search results page. Movie searches will create an Answer Box with photo stills, a synopsis, local show times, and links to trailers.
The future of content navigation Let’s forget business models and monetization — just for a brief moment. Instead, we’ll focus on one key issue: the interface, the way you access, browse, spot, save relevant information. The interface is pivotal. A good one will allow you to rope in your readers / viewers, and make them loyal to your brand, your contents. Pouring money and resources into an editorial effort, striving to get the best out of your team, buying the best contributions, pictures, multimedia features available… All of this is pointless without an effective interface. With this in mind, let’s see what’s lies ahead of us in the interface world. Last week, I spent a couple of days at Microsoft’s Redmond campus, near Seattle. Of my many meetings, a notable one entailed a visit to the Microsoft Live Labs. The most spectacular integration of Photosynth and Seadragon can be seen on the latest version of Microsoft’s Bing Maps (if you connect from the US). Seadragon is based on a simple concept: infinite zooming.
Microsoft Cancels Its "Courier" Tablet 11 Ways to Visualize Changes Over Time – A Guide | FlowingData Deal with data? No doubt you've come across the time-based variety. The visualization you use to explore and display that data changes depending on what you're after and data types. This is a guide to help you figure out what type of visualization to use to see that stuff. Let's start with the basics: the line graph. An example: Comparing Roger Clemens to Hall of Fame Pitchers Scatterplots work well if you have a lot of data points. An example: Oxygen Concentration Over Time Bar charts work best for time series when you're dealing with distinct points in time (as opposed to more continuous data). An example: Who’s Going to Win Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest? Use this the same way you would a bar chart when you have multiple categories (hence the stacking). An example: Bad Housing Loans in Forclosure The stacked area is the stacked bar's more versatile sibling. An example: Past 25 Years of Consumer Spending An example: Income per Person and GDP by Gapminder
Collaborate on Microsoft's Docs.com Within Facebook Groups Microsoft's Docs.com announced today that it now supports sharing documents within Facebook Groups. Microsoft's Fuse labs brought Docs.com to Facebook back in April, but the service hasn't necessarily taken off, in part because sharing documents with a specific group was unwieldy, as you had to add people manually. Now Docs.com promises integration into Facebook Groups, something that wasn't previously possible for third-party apps. Users can share documents within a Group for others to view or edit. Updates to Docs.com will post a story to the Group's Wall as well as to the newsfeeds of its members. And you can leave comments about documents on the Group Wall or within the document itself. You don't need to have Microsoft Office installed to use Docs.com, but the system only supports Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF file uploads. I had a few problems test-driving the integration this morning.
Data Visualization: Modern Approaches End Of An Era: Windows Live Messenger To Be Retired, Users Transitioned To Skype Confirming earlier reports, Microsoft officially announced today it would be retiring its Windows Live Messenger instant messaging service in favor of Skype. In a post on the Skype blog, Tony Bates, Microsoft President, Skype Division, explained that Windows Live Messenger would be retired for all users in the first quarter of 2013, with the only exception being mainland China. Windows Live Messenger will live on in China, with no announced termination date for the service there. Microsoft notes that the move to migrate users from Windows Live Messenger to Skype began with the release of Skype 6.0 for Mac and Windows a fews weeks ago. In that version, users could begin to sign into Skype using a Microsoft account. After doing so, Messenger contacts are brought over as well. Today’s blog post walks users through the switchover process, and promises some “special offers later this year” for Messenger users making the switch.
Clive Thompson on the Power of Visual Thinking | Magazine Illustration: Posttypography When I went online to shop for a laptop this summer, I faced a blizzard of choices. Was an ultralight worth the price, or would a heavier model do? Did I need a big screen, or would it make the computer a pain to lug around? As I flipped from page to page reading screenfuls of specs, the options baffled me. Using one of my son’s Crayolas, I drew doodles of all the laptops and covered them with little icons depicting the pros, cons, and cost of each. In essence, I used “visual thinking”—drawing pictures to solve a problem. My crayon experiment was inspired by Dan Roam, a visual-thinking guru and author of The Back of the Napkin. But dynamic, complicated problems—like global warming and economic reform—often can’t be boiled down to simple narratives. For example, during the health care debate, President Obama couldn’t seem to communicate how the heck reform would work, no matter how many speeches he gave. Email clive@clivethompson.net.
50 Great Examples of Data Visualization Wrapping your brain around data online can be challenging, especially when dealing with huge volumes of information. And trying to find related content can also be difficult, depending on what data you’re looking for. But data visualizations can make all of that much easier, allowing you to see the concepts that you’re learning about in a more interesting, and often more useful manner. Below are 50 of the best data visualizations and tools for creating your own visualizations out there, covering everything from Digg activity to network connectivity to what’s currently happening on Twitter. Music, Movies and Other Media Narratives 2.0 visualizes music. Liveplasma is a music and movie visualization app that aims to help you discover other musicians or movies you might enjoy. Tuneglue is another music visualization service. MusicMap is similar to TuneGlue in its interface, but seems slightly more intuitive. Digg, Twitter, Delicious, and Flickr Internet Visualizations
Flare | Data Visualization for the Web Datavisualization.ch Selected Tools