Written by A series of excellent annotated charts on the main indicators of the European crisis.
Posts in category Media
Interest Rates from 1831 to 2011
An interesting long term perspective of interest rates back to 1831
Fascinating chart from Jim Bianco, looking at interest rates back nearly 2 centuries.
Source : Bianco Research LLC
25 Rules of Disinformation
From Twenty-Five Ways To Suppress Truth: The Rules of Disinformation (Includes The 8 Traits of A Disinformationalist) by H. Michael Sweeney. These 25 rules are everywhere in media, from political debates, to television shows, to comments on a blog.
Consciousness TV
Full article
War – Casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan
The Wall Street Journal interactive chart features dots that can be clicked on for a short biography of the dead soldier.
As of August 27, 2003, deaths since Bush declared the end of the war exceeded those during the invasion. Updated daily.
Source :The Wall Street Journal
Associated Press
The web is what you make of it
Tanjore – its one of the most creative Chrome’s adverts !
Inspired by the real story of G. Rajendran, an artist from Tamil Nadu (Southern India) who used the web to bring the dying art of “Tanjore” paintings back to life and became a successful businessman in the process. The art is supposed to have originated in 1600 A.D and is an important part of the local social and cultural heritage.
How Gasoline Is Made from Oil
This project was done for a 3rd year visual communication design course at the Ohio State University, taught by Professor Brian Stone, using Adobe After Effects. The project was based off of two information graphic panels that related to the subject of gasoline prices and consumption.
Type In Motion
Twitter, Facebook, Google Average Salaries
This infographic from Q&A and research hub Focus analyses how much you can make if you’re fortunate enough to work in Silicon Valley, and asks: with the area’s incredibly high cost of living, is it actually worth it?
Highlights from the visual:
- The top-paid engineers at Google can expect to rake in $180,000 per annum, compared with $155,000 at LinkedIn, $150,000 at Facebook and $125,000 at Twitter
- A software engineer who works at Silicon Valley earns an average of $90,000 (across all companies), compared to the national average of $72,000 (for the same position)
- The average tech salary across all positions in the Valley is $92,299. To achieve the same standard of living would cost $74,808 in New York and just $43,459 in Dallas
The Valley’s tech job market: There are currently around 48,000 jobs at internet companies in the Valley – more than there were than during the late 90′s “dot com boom.”
via Focus
Google+ Guide To Privacy
The new social network from Google, is more considerate of your privacy than was Google Buzz, which took your common email contacts and automatically add them on Buzz. But even after that fiasco, Google+ (Google Plus) might not be keeping it’s word on privacy. It’s just so hard to keep things a secret with Circles!
Circles are neither safe nor private.
It seems that Google has tried to put the privacy issue on top of their list. A few things are missing. Google+ allows a user to re-share something private and make it public. For example, you share a photo with the on Google+ Circle containing your Best Friends and they re-share it with their friends and then the secret picture of you becomes public on the web. The idea behind the re-share was to make it easy for information to spread throughout the social network, similar to a re-tweet, but Google+ doesn’t keep the original privacy settings of the shared item once someone re-shares it.
The Google+ Guide to Privacy
A Guide to Taming Privacy Concerns Around Google+
6 steps to configuring privacy on Google+
via ZoneAlarm
Who Uses Twitter?
Twitter is a new web application playing dual roles of online social networking and micro-blogging. Users communicate with each other by publishing text-based posts. The popularity and open structure of Twitter have attracted for the last two years, small to medium size companies that have seen the need to enhance their brand on Twitter.
Twitter also attracted a large number of automated programs, known as bots, which appear to be a double-edged sword to Twitter.
Read more:
History of Social Media
Social media has become an integral part of modern society. There are general social networks with user bases larger than the population of most countries. There are niche sites for virtually every special interest out there. There are sites to share photos, videos, status updates, sites for meeting new people and sites to connect with old friends. There are social solutions to just about every need.
The Secret History of Social Media – Part 1
Forty years ago, hippies and hackers came together to produce the first attempts at online community. Rory visits the scene of the perhaps the first computer social network open to the general public. Community Memory was a series of terminals in Berkeley and the San Francisco Bay area which opened for business in 1973.
It never picked up more than a handful of users, but as personal computers became more common in the 1980s, a host of online bulletin board systems sprang up around the world – although The WELL was perhaps the most influential. An offshoot of the Whole Earth Catalog, The WELL’s discussion forums interested journalists as well as computer nerds and showed how computer networks might impact offline life.
And Rory follows the trend through to the arrival of the World Wide Web, the thing that turned a mass audience on to the internet and online social networking.
Millions signed up for early sites like SixDegrees and Friendster. But the lack of digital cameras and ubiquitous internet access in its late-90s heyday limited the usefulness of SixDegrees as a networking tool. And Friendster’s sheer popularity in the early 2000s caused tech problems that the company struggled to overcome. It wouldn’t be too long, however, before social networking hit the mainstream.
Interviewees include:
Lee Felsenstein, co-founder, Community Memory
Larry Brilliant, co-founder, The WELL
Stewart Brand, co-founder The WELL
Howard Rheingold, early WELL user, author of The Virtual Community
John Perry Barlow, early WELL user, co-founder Electronic Frontier Foundation
Marc Weber, founding curator, Computer History Museum
Andrew Weinrich, founder, SixDegrees.com
Jonathan Abrams, co-founder, Friendster.
Listen to Part 1 here
The Secret History of Social Media – Part 2
History of Social Media
Rory Cellan-Jones tells the story of the social networking scramble of the early 2000s and finds out how Facebook emerged to become world’s biggest social network.
Online social networking had been around for decades, but the popularity of the World Wide Web opened the door to new applications and mass appeal.
For the first time, ordinary people were using computers to socialize in a new way. The rapid growth of our online lives resulted tempted dozens of entrepreneurs into the social networking fray.
In the UK, Bebo took off in British schools – and struck fear in the hearts of parents. Rory visits the couple who built the site and sold it to American tech giant AOL.
MySpace was once network of the future, but after being bought by News Corporation, its tech problems allowed other sites to take off.
The real push came from American college campuses, where wired hipsters were looking for ways to manage their social lives online.
Facebook wasn’t the first site of its kind – other businesses had a lot in common with Mark Zuckerberg’s efforts – but its simplicity and the single-minded focus of its CEO gave it an advantage over the competition.
From Harvard, Zuckerberg expanded around the world, now counting among his users 500 million people and a third of the British population. But with big growth has come big controversy, over privacy, security, and the targeted advertising that Facebook relies on for the lion’s share of its profits.
Now one company is firmly at the top of the social networking pyramid, but the history of the industry has shown that fame can be fleeting. Rory finds out that even young people are becoming more wary about what they share online – could new networks spot a gap in the market and steal Facebook’s crown?
Interviewees include:
Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO, Facebook
Chris Cox, vice president of product, Facebook
Chris DeWolfe, co-founder MySpace
Julia Angwin, Wall Street Journal reporter, author of Stealing MySpace
Michael and Xochi Birch, co-founders, Bebo
Wayne Ting, co-founder, Campus Network
David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect.
Listen to Part 2 here
The Secret History of Social Media – Part 3
The social networking game isn’t over yet – Rory Cellan-Jones looks at the sites of the future and asks where the phenomenon is heading.
The power of social networks has taken off in recent years. Now, there are more than half a billion Facebook users, but does that mean that one site will dominate social networking in the future? Rory visits the headquarters of microblogging site Twitter, where a new way of sharing information is being developed.
With the explosive growth of Facebook has come vigorous debate about privacy, sharing information online, and about what online social networking is doing to our relationships. Today, some young entrepreneurs think they’ve spotted gaps in the market where Facebook is vulnerable.
New sites are springing up all the time. The future of social networking could lie in localised sites geared towards specific interests, in limiting your online circle to your closest friends, or in sites that allow users to keep control of their personal information.
Finally, Rory returns to the social networking pioneers of the 70s and 80s. How do the hippies and hackers who created the first social network think their revolution has turned out?
Interviewees include:
Biz Stone, co-founder, Twitter
Dennis Crowley, co-founder, Foursquare
Reid Hoffman, co-founder, LinkedIn
Dave Morin, co-founder, Path
Brian Hughes Halferty, co-founder, Kiltr
Johan Stael von Holstein, co-founder, MyCube
Daniel Grippi, co-founder Diaspora*
Baroness Susan Greenfield, professor of pharmacology, Lincoln College Oxford
Natalia Morari, Moldovan journalist and activist
Larry Brilliant, co-founder, The WELL
John Perry Barlow, early WELL user, co-founder Electronic Frontier Foundation
Lee Felsenstein, co-founder, Community Memory.
Listen to Part 3 here
By Rory Cellan-Jones
The BBC’s technology correspondent, on how technology is changing our lives
This article was originally published on the BBC Website.
