I have a Word doc on my computer titled "Rules." It started with a "Rules of the New Labor Pool" sidebar that ran alongside my original Wired story on crowdsourcing and has been in a state of constant revision ever since. One rule that's been a mainstay is Be Humble. It's time for the doctor to take his own medicine. Alan Booker, a teacher at Washington College in Chicago, has been faithfully sending me daily crowdsourcing updates from the day the Wired article hit newsstands. It's high time his contributions were acknowledged, and some of his more choice comments upgraded to a post. Here's Alan:
Here is a new IBM Beta site, Many Eyes. A site where you can see your data visualizations and multiple people can access them for a collaborative experience. The amount of interactivity is pretty interesting, many layers and highly developed.
“Investigate the social and communicative value of information visualization.”
Alan.
Flickr for data dorks! If anyone has gotten this far without following Alan's link to check out Many Eyes, quit reading and do so. Big Blue has made so many smart moves (like incorporating open source principles into its software development process) in the last several years it's really given the lie to the notion that big companies can't be innovative and nimble.
It's no accident that Many Eyes (which is still in Alpha) is the brainchild of Martin Wattenberg, a bit of a rock star in the interstice between art and technology. If you don't recognize his name, you'll probably remember his most famous creation, the Map of the Market: http://www.smartmoney.com/marketmap/
I do think Many Eyes could be improved. The toolset to create the visualizations is pretty limited. I'd like to see Wattenberg and the rest of the team at IBM's Visual Communications Lab take a page from Will Wright's Spore and create a massive, flexible toolbox for customization, and then open each graph, chart or map to collaboration a la a Wiki. Maybe that's all in the works, or maybe that's inadvisable given exigencies with which I'm unaware. At any rate, it's as impressive an Alpha launch as I can remember.
Posted by: Jeff Howe | January 31, 2007 at 02:02 PM
Alan, you really get the whole "share" ethos of the web and CS - kudos! I hope your semester is going well, ... mine is a bit rough this year. grumble. grumble. :D
... Shazz
Posted by: Shazz | January 31, 2007 at 11:13 PM
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