A Telling Map of Job Losses

Slate's Moneybox has an interactive map that shows job creation and loss throughout the US for the past two years. Watching it flow through each month's up and down definitely made the employment situation in the country clearer to me. Like any great visualization image and the legend make it very clear what's happening. Here's Slate's explanation of how they created this:

Using the Labor Department's local area unemployment statistics, Slate presents the recession as told by unemployment numbers for each county in America. Because the data are not seasonally adjusted for natural employment cycles throughout the year, the numbers you see show the change in the number of people employed compared with the same month in the previous year. Blue dots represent a net increase in jobs, while red dots indicate a decrease. The larger the dot, the greater the number of jobs gained or lost.

The country begins a awash with blue (job growth) in January 2006:

By February 2009 job loss looks like:

Slate is using readily available public data, but presenting it in a much more digestible form than what you see in this table of similar data from the Labor Department:

The table is good for diving in to see a specific data point, but the map draws us out and shows us a larger story in motion. I hope that story goes back to blue soon.

At Where 2.0 in May we will hear from a number of speakers who create these types of maps. Matthew Ericson of the New York Times will discuss the maps they used in their election coverage and Michal Migurski of Stamen Design will be explore data sources for maps. Registration is still open; you can use whr09rdr for 25% off.

Ignite Show: Monica Guzman on Being an Awesome News Commenter

This week's Ignite Show features Seattle PI reporter Monica Guzman. She's spent most of her career writing for online properties and she's been able to watch learn what makes for a good conversation around a news item. As someone who also spends a lot of time publishing content online I can appreciate Monica's thoughts on good commenters and hearing some of what she deals with makes me very appreciative of our readers and how you add to the conversations on our site.

The Ignite Show is also available on iTunes.

Ignite Seattle Line-up

Ignite Seattle 6 will take place on 4/29 at the King Cat Theatre. Doors will open at 7PM and talk will start at 8:30PM. We are very grateful to be getting sponsorship from Google and Biznik.

We'll feature 16 speakers doing great 5 minute talks and geek contest to kick off the night. We're still looking for 8 more speakers; if you want to speak submit your talk by 4/16. Here are the first 8 speakers:

Dawn Rutherford (@dawnoftheread) - Public Library Hacking
Money tight? Want to save more for a rainy day? If you aren't fully utilizing your public library, you might be wasting thousands of dollars a year!Librarian Dawn Rutherford will give you a quick trip through all your public libraries have to offer, and how to make the most of it, using tricks and tips gleaned from someone who has spent over half her life working or volunteering in them.

Mike Tykka - The Invention of the Wheel
It seems Nature has beaten man to almost every "invention" of his: Helicopters, Submarines, Electricity, Video Cameras, Supercomputers, etc. For the longest time i thought one notable exception was the wheel - seems hard to do out of flesh: think blood vessels; How do they attach? Then i started studying biochemistry and learned about proteins. Turns out nature has invented a full blown, reversible, proton driven turbine engine, many tens of thousands of which churn away in every one of the billions of cells in a human body.

Beth Goza (@bethgo) - Knitting in Code
Remember the joy of writing your first Hello World application? Do you still have a copy somewhere so you can gaze upon your coded baby steps into the world of binary goodness? In knitting, creating something beautiful is just like binary, with a series of knits and pearls you can dream up the most sophisticated of patterns. In the spirit of hi-tech meets hand-tech, I will show you how to convert your binary Hello World app into a pattern of stitches (think kint =1 pearl = 0), so that you can create, mount, frame and hang your Hello World genius for all to see.

Hillel Cooperman (@hillel) - The Secret Underground World of Lego
Get a glimpse of a thriving user generated content ecosystem that's been around since long before the web. See an incredible example of a community, and how a large corporation has completely let go of control only to find incredible success despite and maybe because of the economic downturn.

Shelly Farnham (@ShellyShelly) Community Genius: Leveraging Community to Increase your Creative Powers
We've all heard that it's a myth that creativity occurs in isolation. We've even heard about *group genius*, the ability for group with "flow" to create ground-breaking works of art or technology. Well, in this brief talk Shelly Farnham, social scientist and leading expert in community technologies, will take it to the next level and provide tips for how to leverage *community genius* to improve your creative powers.

Katherine Hernandez (@ipodtouchgirl) - The Mac Spy
I made a last minute decision to attend a meeting I somehow caught wind of. Assured of its importance, I flew down yet again, not even a month after MacWorld, to see what would happen at this 25 year reunion of the Berkeley Mac User Group.

Scott Berkun (Scottberkun.com)- How and Why to Give an Ignite Talk
To give a good talk you want to have a story. You have to be able to frame it. If you're going to give an Ignite talk you have to really, really quickly.

Scotto Moore (Scotto.org)- Intangible Method
A digital fairy tale about a young woman who realizes that first person video footage from her own life is being posted to YouTube - before the events actually occur in real life.

Jen Zug (@jenzug) - The Sanity Hacks of a Stay At Home Mom
Drawing from her real life as a stay at home mom (as opposed to her imaginary life as a bar tender on Cape Cod), Jen Zug shares her parenting hacks to staying sane when the majority of her day is spent discussing the merits of Optimus Prime over Buzz Light Year.

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Tweenbots: Cute Beats Smart

If you wanted to build a robot that could go from one end of Washington Square Park to the other without your help how would you do it? How expensive in time and money would it be? Would you build or buy a navigation system? Construct a sensing system to detect obstacles? Or would you decide to take a different tact and use cute as your primary tool?

ITP student Kacie Kinzer created a 10-inch smiling robot called a Tweenbot that can only go straight. For each journey Kacie would give the robot a destination and clearly label it. Given the obstacles in its way and lack of navigation or steering systems the expectation was that the robot would not make it. However the robot's avoidance of the uncanny valley and clearly written goal helped it out. Humans would redirect the Tweenbot so it successfully reached its destination. Below is a map of one Tweenbot journey:

Mission 1: Get from the Northwest to the Southwest Corner of Washington Square Park / time: 42 minutes / number of people who intervened: 29

As Kacie describes on the site:

Over the course of the following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, "You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”

So why do people help out the tweenbot? Personally I would not be able to resist assisting the anthropomorphized little robot. The smile signals its innocent intentions and the Tweenbot's label makes it clear how to help. It's something for designers and technologists to remember; sometimes cute and clever can get the job done much cheaper and in less time than smart and expensive.

There are more Tweenbots coming so if you happen to see any friendly robots around your town lend a hand. Here are some of the prototypes that are currently in development.

via Hacker News

Becoming Location Aware: Where 2.0 Early Registration Ending 4/13

Despite the downturn the geolocation space is still active. This year's Where 2.0 conference will be highlighting the companies, technologies and people that make the industry go. Where 2.0 is happening in San Jose at the Fairmount Hotel from 5/19-21(the first day is workshops; the next two are all mainstage talks). Early registration ends this Tuesday, 4/13. You can get an extra 25% off for being a Radar reader with this code: whr09rdr.

The schedule for the show is almost full. The hottest topic this year is location-aware apps, services and data. It's been almost a full-year since the iPhone enabled third-party apps to use our location; we're going to hear from startups, researchers and the platform providers.

Two of our keynoters will dive into what can and should be done with location data. MIT Professor Sandy Pentland, the fellow responsible for coining the term Reality Mining and author of Honest Signals, will discuss his research on mining company communication patterns and his location data ownership initiatives. Microsoft Researcher Eric Horvitz has been gathering location data from volunteers for over 5 years. Using this data he has created virtual assistants, life stream recorders and other forward looking applications for our historical location data.

Many of the location-aware startups are operating in the mobile space. Mobile social networks are facing an increasingly crowded market -- one that was just entered by Google's Latitude and still waiting entries from both Facebook and Nokia. We'll hear from the founders of Foursquare and Brightkite as well as Pelago (Radar post) how they are going to grow in this market.

Your location data is going to become increasingly valuable. Startup Sense Networks will discuss their business of of extracting insights from large amounts of location data. I am sure Nokia's Michael Halbherr will touch on the wealth of data they have from acquisitions like NAVTEQ and Plazes and how they will be supplemented through Nokia's devices. Perry Evans will discuss the nascent ad market for location-based services.

Even though the iPhone has made finding a user's popular that doesn't mean it's become easy or even possible on other devices. There will be two developer workshops dedicated to the topic -- one for finding users on the web and another for native mobile applications.

The day after Where 2.0 ends there will be the third edition of WhereCamp where the conversation will continue.

PhoneGap, the Mobile Platform Democratizer

Phonegap is an opensource development framework for mobile platforms. It allows developers to build native apps in HTML and JavaScript. Currently PhoneGap works for the iPhone and Android, but Blackberry and other OSs are on the way. You can get PhoneGap from Github or Google Code.

There are eighteen iPhone apps listed on the PhoneGap site. Though the apps are created with web technologies PhoneGap provides access to the phone's client APIs and run in Objective-C. I tested both Roadtrippr and the fun Blok-Buster Lite. As promised the apps are able to use my phone's location, accelerometer and multi-touch controls. Though the functionality was there both apps seemed a bit flat. This could have been related to their design, but I suspect that it is a PhoneGap issue.

Nitobi, the Vancouver-based company behind Phonegap, intends to make money via future services. Developers will be able to upload their HTML and JavaScript and get back a URL for a tested, compiled app for each platform. Nitobi won the People's Choice award last week at the Web 2.0 Expo SF during our Launchpad event where they launched a desktop emulator for their supported patforms. Both Techcrunch and ReadWriteWeb covered the event.

PhoneGap still has a ways to go before it is the one framework to rule them all. Their Roadmap is below and they would be thrilled if any of you wanted to assist them. In the feature-platform matrix below green means done, yellow means in-progress and red means not currently possible (they'll have to update the redblock in the Copy/Paste column of the iPhone for when 3.0 comes out).

Though the Palm Pre isn't listed it is definitely on Nitobi's mind, but don't expect them to support regular mobiles or even earlier smart phones. Only the latest generation of smartphones will be targeted.

There's a gold-rush happening right now in mobile marketplaces. However not everyone is able to participate and not all platforms are receiving equal attention. PhoneGap has the potential to be a great democratizer. It lowers the bar for developers to create powerful applications out of very familiar web technologies. It also enables sites to support versions of their apps for mobile platforms other than the iPhone. If you don't have an iPhone (or even if you do) you should be cheering this project along.

Ignite Seattle Returns! Submit a Talk

After a year-long hiatus Ignite Seattle is returning to a bigger and better venue. We'll feature 16 speakers doing great 5 minute talks and geek contest to kick off the night. Ignite Seattle 6 will take place on 4/29. Doors will open at 7PM and talk will start at 8:30PM. We are very grateful to be getting sponsorship from Google and Biznik.

After a long search Ignite will be at the King Cat Theatre in Downtown Seattle. It's a great space that has a bar, 700+ theatre-style seats and a great stage. This venue will allow everyone to have a seat and should provide us a good home for some time.

As always we are searching for talks. As always each speaker gets just 20 slides that autoadvance every 15 seconds for a total of 5 minutes. We are looking for talks that geeks would love. This can be how-to's, historical deepdives, a technical explanation, or just a great story. If you want to speak submit your talk by 4/16.

If you're not familiar with Ignite you can check out some videos from the Ignite Show.

If you were thinking of going to the Techflash Live event that same night do not worry about a potential conflict. We've coordinated with them and you'll have plenty of time to walk the two blocks between the events. Ben Huh, Chief Cheezburger of Pet Holdings will be speaking.

RSVP on Upcoming. RSVP on Facebook.

Ignite Show: Dr. Jayson Falkner on DNA Science, It Works!

At Ignite Portland #5, Dr. Jayson Falkner explained the latest in DNA Science, how its effected human evolution and what it's doing to our society. We've cleaned it up and put it into Episode 6 of the Ignite Show. The title is a tribute to the classic XKCD cartoon "Science! It Works....".

The Ignite Show will feature a different speaker every Tuesday for free. It's available on YouTube (user: Ignite), on our Ignite site and via iTunes. It is being released under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Download the file.

Ignite SF @ Expo: 4/1 at Mezzanine

Ignite is coming back to San Francisco. On April First, the second night of the Web 2.0 Expo, I'll be hosting an Ignite at the Mezzanine (just four short blocks away from Moscone). As with all Ignites each speaker will only get 20 slides that each auto-advance every 15 seconds for a total of five minutes. Folks with a Web 2.0 Expo Badge will get priority entrance, but we'll open the doors to everyone before the talks start. Ignite is free.

The schedule for the evening will be:

7:30 - Doors Open; Entry is for anyone with Conference or Expo Plus Pass holders
8:15 - Entry for Anyone
8:30 - First Set of Speakers

• Danny O'Brien (EFF) Don't Push Me Cos I'm Close To The Edge
• Raven Hanna (MadeWithMolecules)- Science of Love
• Thor Muller (GetSatisfaction) - We're all Collapsitarians Now!
• Veronica Belmont(Tekzilla) - Make Your Business a Meme
• Michael Galpert(Aviary) - Images on the internets may appear realer than they are
• Aaron Rowe(Wired Science) - SARS, Drugs, and Biosensors
• Greg Elin(Sunlight Foundation) - Mr Hacker Goes to Washington

9:15 - Break

9:45 - Second Set of Speakers

• Jeff Veen (Small Batch Inc.) - "Great Designers Steal"
• Violet blue (Tiny Nibbles) - Open Source Everything
• Brian Malow (Science Comedian) - Hydrogen and Helium
• Heather Gold (the Heather Gold Show)- How to Get a Lesbian Pregnant
• Lisa Katyama (Tokyo Mango) -Japanese Tech Culture: Demystifying "Weird" Japanese Toys and Tools
• Romi Mahajan (Ascentium) - The Consumer Experience is DEAD
• Jer Faludi (Faludi Design) - Priorities for a greener world: If you could design anything, what should you do?
• Jen Bekman (20x200) - Overcrowded- How Crowd-sourcing is ruining everything.
• Mat Honan (Barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com) - Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle

I hope to see you there. You can RSVP on Facebook or Upcoming.

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Wikirank: A Zeitgeist for Wikipedia

Wikipedia is one of the most significant sites on the web. It produces vast quantities of data and the Wikimedia foundation tries to make all of it available to the public. Wikipedia's traffic data can be an insight into what's interesting on the web. Wikirank, currently in closed beta, shares that information very cleanly.

On its homepage Wikirank shows which Wikipedia articles are the most read and which pages are gaining in popularity. Additionally, you can find each article's detail page via search. On the detail page you can find and article excerpt, traffic numbers and a (soon-to-be-embeddable) traffic chart that allow you to compare traffic with other topics (up to four).

Wikirank (@wikirank) was produced by Small Batch Inc.. The design was done by Jeff Veen, most lately of Google Analytics and previously of Measure Map and Adaptive Path.

Update: In a comment Veen said: Second, the UI wasn't designed just by me, but was a group effort that included the rest of Small Batch's cofounders: Bryan Mason, Greg Veen and Ryan Carver. We also were fortunate enough to work with the very talented Dan Cederholm from Simplebits.

In an email, Veen told me that the charts were built without Flash. It's all Javascript using the HTML Canvas element . The data is being processed in EC2 and stored on S3. Tokyo Cabinet is being used to manage the data store.

With a service like Google Trends available you might wonder why this is significant. Wikipedia only has one page for the Python or Ruby programming languages where as there are a lot of other Rubies or Pythons (or George or Paul for that matter) that dirty the data for the same query on Google Trends. As an added bonus Wikirank will report on Google properties (unlike Google Trends).

You can sign up to be notified of their launch. If you don't want to wait for Wikirank to go live you could bide our time with some of these alternatives. Wikirage tracks which Wikipedia pages are being edited the most -- a good way of judging recent news or controversy. Wikichecker will produce a summary of edits for a page such as Tokyo (the page includes an intriguing "Frequent users also edit these articles" which is an unusual path to potentially similar articles). Wikitrends shows the most popular Wikipedia pages in fourteen languages.

Wikirank is a testament to good, clean design and the power of existing web tools. It's the first project from Small Batch, but it won't be the last. I expect that their other projects will also focus on data visualization

Jeff Veen will be keynoting at the Web 2.0 Expo SF on 4/3 and speaking at Ignite SF on 4/1.

Recent Posts

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• Ignite Show: Andrew Schneider, Experimental Performance Devices on March 11, 2009
• DIY City Releases DIY Traffic on February 25, 2009
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• Ignite Show: Jason Grigsby on Cup Noodle on February 19, 2009
• Web 2.0 Expo: Launchpad Extended, Developer Discount and Ignite! on February 17, 2009
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