If like me you are a sucker for visualisation tools (despite in my case having the design skills of a five year old), then it's worth getting your hands on one of the remaining Web Trend Map accounts.
Web Trend Map is the brainchild of Tokyo based Oliver Reichenstein and Craig Mod , the people who design the World Internet Map (based on the Tokyo underground) every year.
According to Information Aesthetics, data is filtered as follows:
All information - micro curation (so Twitter) - micro aggregation (links) - macro aggregation (top sources). You then get a chessboard type visualisation for whatever you are looking into (for example - see the map they have online about 'all things typographical').
Apparently users will soon be able to create their own web trend maps on the site...assuming they buy one of the remaining $49 accounts, which also comes with a world Internet map poster shipped to you from Japan.
Seemed like a worthwhile punt to me, especially if it gives me a way to break up and illustrate the pages and pages of copy that tend to go into my documents. If nothing else, based on what they did with their World Internet Map, it will give me more than $49 worth of viewing pleasure!
- All-electric taxi coming to Tokyo (ubergizmo.com)
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