Found here, where there are plenty more, available to buy as cards.

Have an excellent Christmas, if I don’t write again before then.

Like many people, I’m really looking forward to the UK publication of David McCandless’ The Visual Miscellaneum.

This graphic might come as a surprise to some people. If the main way you’ve found out about social media is through conference programmes and the most frequently cited blog posts, you could not be blamed for assuming that the social web is a world of men. The opposite is nearly always the case.

Interesting that digg is the only male-dominated social network in this sample. I will leave it to the reader to draw any conclusions between that and the tone of the comments and focus on winning that site has.

P.S. Just found this in my inbox — Millennial Moms — “Millennial Moms are supplanting college students as the most connected and technology dependant [sic] population”.

Because these images are machine-generated, there’s a temptation to believe that they are transparent. That they are mirrors of hard-and-fast facts. They are not. No image is unmediated nor undesigned. Someone decided to style the information in this way, with this scope and format, these colours and these dimensions. And there’s an agenda in that, whether overt or unrealised: this is how we visualise this stuff and how we want you to visualise it, too. They fulfil an ideological function.

For this post about data-visualisations, I’m going to focus on the visualisation part of the term (“You can picture it like this“), rather than the data part.

Why are these the images that are selected and why do they look the way they do?

The Connected Web

These types of images are especially popular. I think that when you sign the application for the International League of Social Media Consultants, you must pledge to include them in every slide deck.

This is what the web looks like, we’re told. The visualisation holds a nod to the Powers of Ten and the Mandelbrot Set, a web of terrifying complexity that will reveal infinitely more layers of complexity the closer you zoom in. This web is far bigger than you know, or can possibly know. They may remind you, too, of the molecular diagrams of complex carbohydrates that you never quite understood properly at school.

It looks like this because today’s web is about interconnectedness, not just in the sense of wires under the streets, but the connections of tribes of influence and ultimately of every individual on the web – each of which is subtly different (unless, of course, they are not). The colours are interesting, too. Note the preponderance of blue (unvisited links) and red (alert!) in these pictures.

Why do Web 2.0 presentations nearly always start with this image? Because they need to disabuse you of the notion that the web looks like this:

You don’t need a £1000-a-day consultant for a web with one input box and two buttons, one of which is almost never used. No; understanding the web requires science beyond your ken and difficult Maths.

The Tag Cloud

I’m actually a big fan of tag-clouds – as I’ve mentioned before. I think they encourage exploration, individual journeys and also give an instantly understood visual fingerprint to a site.

So two thumbs-up for ones like this:

The ones that I’m less keen on sometimes look a bit like this:

Or, even worse, like this:

The video shows CNN creating – and then seriously discussing – a ‘word cloud’ in its terminology, made from President Obama’s press conference on March 24. Not a brilliant starting point. Tag clouds do not provide a lot of analysis for documents. They flag up the main topics. They do nothing to establish sentiment or tone. If Obama’s speech had consisted entirely of questions, rather than statements, the tag cloud would look exactly the same.

By the way, UK’s Daily Telegraph immediately copied the idea, to our shame, in order to ‘analyse’ the Chancellor’s budget speech last month:

The Friend Wheel

The Friend Wheel became one of the enduring visual images to try to explain Facebook and the Social Graph – the network’s term for the interconnectedness of your friends in a social network – and why advertising on it will work (click for big).

What the hell does this show? Well, that my friends on Facebook sit in three broad groups: the green ones are the social media whores – they all know each other as well as me. I’ll probably see them at a London networking event once a month. The blue ones seem to know each other, but not the greens. They are perhaps specialists or old work colleagues. The pinks are less likely to know the greens and blues – maybe family and friends who came a little later to the network?

What you realise after a while, is that everybody’s friend wheel looks exactly the same. That’s what Facebook is like. People who don’t do the whole social media thing probably won’t have as much of a green crowd, but for them, school friends or people within a large corporation might take their place.

Again, it seems like over-complication and scientification of some common sense about what Facebook is like. This, more familiar, view of your friends doesn’t look like you need a specialist firm advising you:

But, oh!, the colours and so many lines!

Last Words

I am not remotely as cynical as this might imply. I remain an enormous fan of data visualisations, despite all of this, and advise a visit to Visual Complexity on a weekly basis to get your fix. But do be alert: don’t forget that this is an art as much as a science. ;-)