Wednesday, May 29, 2002

The Blogosphere ecology Microcontent News discovers the ecology of the blogosphere INTRODUCING THE BLOGOSPHERE Bloggers and Journalists form a blogging biosphere that has become an ecosystem in its own right, an ecosystem that one savvy blogger has dubbed the Blogosphere.  The word was meant as a clever pun combining "Blog" with "logos", a Greek word meaning logic and reason.  And while bloggers do often use logic in dissecting arguments, I love the word Blogosphere because it happens to capture another truth: the Blogosphere is a biosphere of its own, a Media Ecosystem that lives and breathes just like any other biological system. Like any ecosystem, the Blogosphere demonstrates all the classic ecological patterns: predators and prey, evolution and emergence, natural selection and adaptation.  I've often thought that anthropologists were best equipped to deconstruct the emerging blogging sub-culture, but now I'm convinced I got it wrong: the greater mysteries of the Blogosphere will be unlocked instead by evolutionary biologists. comments? [] 11:09:30 PM     Visualizing Iincome Distribution patterns in America Income Distribution.  Here's a topic of undeniable interest to everyone that is usually obscured by a fog of statistics.   Here's an attempt to plug into our intuitive visual pattern recognition abilities.  Building "mass" is proportional to income.  Time progresses from left to right.   Further refinements could well follow....   (to Kevin Phillips, author of Wealth and Democracy) Mr. Phillips,   I enjoyed hearing your segment on NPR's "The Connection" last week and was struck by how important it is that the data you discuss be apprehended by widely.  You opined that this information could be "incendiary" if it were more widely understood, but I'm not confident that page 134 of the CBO's Effective Federal Tax Rates will be substantially more galvanizing than a recitation of the numbers.    My interest is in information visualization and the psychology of perception, and your presentation inspired me to recast the data you referenced in a form that does justice to the data and to the highly sophisticated (but non-numerical) pattern recognition abilities of the "common folk" who need to come to grips with these issues.  Here is a draft rendering that might be helpful.  I'd appreciate your comments and perhaps assistance in developing and visualization that can help tell the story clearly, directly, and accurately.     Might we chat?  I'd be interested in clarifying some of the issues raised at the bottom-left.  Can you point me to appropriate data sets that span a wider time range, and deal with wealth-distribution and happiness-distribuiton (data on the latter may be available from the folks at Harris Interactive, with whom I have been discussing a collaboration).  I imagine the resulting visualization would be useful to you and illuminating to your readers.  In any case, I'd be interested in any comments or criticisms you may have.       Income Distribution (to Kevin Phillips, author of Wealth and Democracy) Mr. Phillips,   I enjoyed hearing your segment on NPR's "The Connection" last week and was struck by how important it is that the data you discuss be apprehended by widely.  You opined that this information could be "incendiary" if it were more widely understood, but I'm not confident that page 134 of the CBO's Effective Federal Tax Rates will be substantially more galvanizing than a recitation of the numbers.    My interest is in information visualization and the psychology of perception, and your presentation inspired me to recast the data you referenced in a form that does justice to the data and to the highly sophisticated (but non-numerical) pattern recognition abilities of the "common folk" who need to come to grips with these issues.  Here is a draft rendering that might be helpful.  I'd appreciate your comments and perhaps assistance in developing and visualization that can help tell the story clearly, directly, and accurately.     Might we chat?  I'd be interested in clarifying some of the issues raised at the bottom-left.  Can you point me to appropriate data sets that span a wider time range, and deal with wealth-distribution and happiness-distribuiton (data on the latter may be available from the folks at Harris Interactive, with whom I have been discussing a collaboration).  I imagine the resulting visualization would be useful to you and illuminating to your readers.  In any case, I'd be interested in any comments or criticisms you may have comments? [] 10:01:28 PM

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