Data. Yes, we all dream about getting our hands dirty with data nowadays. Data as Seductive Material (by designer Matt Jones, co-founder of Dopplr) Data as Seductive Material, Spring Summit, Umeå March09 View more documents from Matt Jones . Matt connects Seduction - perhaps the magic that Ben is talking It’s the word on everyone’s lips and… err fingertips. I’ve read a number of excellent blog posts and seen some killer presentations on the subject over the past few days and I thought I’d share.

Data visualization artist Aaron Koblin gave a talk at BBH London yesterday which, being in the same building, we were lucky enough to be able to attend.  Music fans are probably familiar with Aaron’s work for the Radiohead House of Cards video, which used no cameras or lights, but merely manipulated data using a lasers and sensors to capture 3D images. There’s a lot of information on the video, and the video itself, Aaron took us through his work, from his student days at UCLA where he worked on projects including the visualization of US flight patterns , to his work at Yahoo!

We already knew that people were passionate about data visualization, but the interest and debate sparked by Manuel Lima’s recent talk at Made By Many has been quite something. Manuel provided a fascinating ‘deep dive into data visualization’ covering its academic beginnings, his experiences curating VisualComplexity.com and what he believes is needed for this discipline to blossom in the future. For starters, we were almost twice oversubscribed for the talk and only just managed to squeeze everyone into the room (thanks to BBH London for hosting us).

Manuel provided a fascinating ‘deep dive into data visualization’ covering its academic beginnings, his experiences curating VisualComplexity.com and what he believes is needed for this discipline to blossom in the future. MxM talk: Manuel Lima on data visualization from Made By Many on Vimeo . (Or Barely appeased, some For starters, we were almost twice oversubscribed for the talk and only just managed to squeeze everyone into the room (thanks to BBH London for hosting us). However it was the Q&A and subsequent blog posts that showed how this topic can

That most hallowed of mental models and glib explanations, the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom hierarchy has taken a bit of a beating this week. Better to think that KNOWLEDGE is the way we create INFORMATION from DATA. If we share knowledge then we can understand information.” It started in a innocent enough way when, in a discussion about knowledge sharing and generation on the KM4Dev listserve, somebody cited the DIKW model as a way of describing how knowledge is generated in organisations. This provoked Dave Snowden into some sharp but illuminating posts

The power and beauty of data visualization is something that the crew at Made By Many always get excited about. Making previously ‘invisible’ information visible, not to mention aesthetically stunning, is a fascinating and rapidly growing field. Manuel will be re-presenting his TED talk on understanding complex interconnectedness and highlights from a range of fascinating information visualization projects. (This post is coming from Justin who has recently joined us here at Made by Many- posting it under my blog account while we’re setting one up for him.

I’ve enjoyed following the debate around Manuel Lima’s information visualisation manifesto, published after he spoke here at Kingly Street in last month (see Justin’s post below). The manifesto was sparked by a call from a part of the audience for a critical discourse on data visualisation, so that we could stop just going “Ooohhh” and begin to answer the question ‘What makes a good diagram?’. Manuel’s response was the succinct and simple yardstick: “form follows revelation”. He elaborates: “Form doesn’t follow data.

The billion-years rise of extropy — as it flings up stable molecules, solar systems, a planetary atmosphere, life, mind and the technium — can be restated as the slow accumulation of ordered information. Or rather, the slow ordering of accumulated information. Information is its own force in the universe, which started with energy, became increasingly matter, but also increasingly dematerialized So writes Kevin Kelly in a very important review of the role of information in countering the natural entropy of the universe. Excerpt: “The technium can be understood

Day: Peripheral Vision: Detecting the Weak Signals That Will Make or Break Your Company Subscribe to this blogs feed « Facebook For Business: A Win Even If Its Not | Main | Intel launches a company-ranking site: CoolSW » October 07, 2007 More On Formalizing Informal Networks Jay Cross brings up some specific (and valid) cautionary points related to a recent McKinsey article on " Harnessing the Power of Informal Social Networks " that I also commented on here . disagree however that

Why the Future of Corporate Computing is ‘Informal’ by Joe McKendrick December 1, 2007 at 6:07 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking , Barriers , Enterprise 2.0 , Enterprise Software , Facebook , IT Department , Information Management , Messy World , Social Computing , Web 2.0 Nick Carr may be down on IT, but he’s hot on social networking software. The author of IT Doesn’t Matter has sparred frequently with Harvard colleague Andrew McAfee on the value of Enterprise 2.0, but makes the following