via GOOD
Lapham’s Quarterly is responsible for this fun chart showing how luminaries of literature and art including Virginia Woolf, Jackson Pollock, and, yes, Kevin Bacon, are all associated.
is a 30-year-old human being, lives in Chapel Hill, NC, works as Vice President of newfangled.com, reads, writes, draws, and thinks about the future.
• Ask me anything
Christopher Butler
Christopher Butler
BibliOdyssey has a post collecting victorian infographics that is worth checking out…
A flickr set of Victorian Infographics
Comparative Geography (mountains + rivers), 1854 (via peacay)
Visualizing Blogging Activity
I have a hypothesis that our company is much like an ecosystem—comprised of many areas ofunseen activity in addition to the very visible activity. With that in mind, I’ve been collecting data for the past few weeks that is a bit different from what I might normally look at (i.e. website and financial data). I want to see what unknown connections there might be between what we do intentionally and what we do unintentionally.
The graph above, containing one set of data from my “peripheral data collection” of late, shows the number of blog posts we’ve published since starting the Newfangled blog back in October, 2006. Throughout these three years, we’ve never had any established quota for publishing frequency, so I wondered what conclusions I might be able to make from looking at post frequency from the beginning until now. One immediate conclusion I can make is that this is not a large enough sample of data to support identifying significant cycles. There are only two full years represented, and the truth of the matter is that our blogging was fairly inconsistent during those three years for pretty discernable reasons. The first is due to population. From 2007 through 2009, we added 9 new employees to our team, all of whom have contributed to the blog. We also lost a few who blogged from time to time. The second is due to a sense of purpose. When we first started, many of our post were culturally oriented, “look-what-I-found” kinds of posts. It wasn’t really until July of 2008, when I published a post called Newfangled Blogging 2.0 that we really began to focus our efforts. In fact, July of 2008 was a time when we were focusing on defining a web content strategy in earnest, blogging being just one piece. After that, we started to plan our writing- identifying topics we wanted to see covered in the blog, making the frequency more consistent and encouraging more people to write. We’ve been moderately successful in that; our production schedule does make it a challenge to do all that we want to do. But, we’re getting the hang of it.
Note, for example, the May-June-July pattern that shows up in 2008 and repeats in 2009. That’s an interesting trend. It used to be that summers were a slower time at Newfangled. But since 2007, summers have been the opposite. They’ve been very, very busy, so I’m not surprised to see the decrease in blogging at the outset of that season. I also wonder if we’ll uncover a similar pattern in October-November-December. Time will tell.
If I had to identify one of the biggest themes from the past year at Newfangled, one of them would definitely be measurement. In fact, ever since we started a serious resourcing effort back in 2007, we’ve been learning just how valuable data is to us in general. Having access to real data is necessary to evaluating just about anything—whether it’s the performance of a newlsetter campaign, the pages of your website, or even the people at your firm. Without it, you wouldn’t be able to answer the questions that really matter:
“What is this worth?” “Is this working?” “What should we change?”
Ok, so you should be pretty psyched about data. If you’re not yet, I’ve done you a favor and gathered together nine posts from the past year that are all about data. Don’t worry, they’re not terribly technical, and each includes a helpful visualization that is created to help communicate the key point concluded from the data collected. Go nuts!
World Bank Now Included in Google Public Data
Google has just released World Bank public data, which allows you to sift through various metrics and create embeddable graphs. This graph compares the number of internet users as percentage of population in the United States vs. Malaysia (where I lived from 2005-2006). It’s interesting that the rate of growth is very similar between the two countries, only delayed by a handful of years in Malaysia.
In conjunction with the relaunch of their website, CNN asked me to examine their web statistics and create a visual record of the site’s last 13 years. We were both interested in telling a larger story about the growth of the Internet and the public’s changing media habits through the lens of such an influential and heavily trafficked site.
The process started by determining what metrics might hold an interesting narrative, and which ones were available over the entire lifespan of the site. CNN was able to provide me with daily page views, the top 20 days for each year and the most popular pages on those days. I was also provided with monthly category views and lists of the nations visiting the site.
The spike chart of average weekly page views forms the centerpiece of the chart. The busiest 10 weeks are called out, and the events associated with the week are highlighted below the x-axis… along with other events of cultural significance or large week-over-week gains. I also tracked the absolute and relative growth of their site categories over time, and highlighted several unique metrics at the top of the chart, including the busiest and slowest days of the year, and the number of countries that visit the site (192 at last count). Finally, to put everything in context, I found milestones in the history of the Internet for each year which I placed along the bottom of the chart to create context for the narrative.
Ultimately, I think the most fascinating story here is the change in our news habits after September 11, 2001. After this day, a new and higher baseline for visits to the site is established, and the inference is that this event really established CNN.com and the greater Internet as a reliable, timely and indispensable source for news.
From ScienceNews on “The Why of Sleep:”
In the first four stages of sleep, heart rate, body temperature and brain activity drop, supporting the view that sleep serves to save energy. But then REM comes along. During REM sleep, the body becomes paralyzed, which keeps people from acting out their dreams. Although the body is still as stone, the flight-or-fight response system is in overdrive, says Michael Perlis of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Brain activity is as high or sometimes even higher than during wakefulness. “The brain is on fire,” during REM, Perlis says. “The brain is cooking, but the body is a cold fish.”
When asked how they initially found out about us, many of our clients will recall searching for something online and finding our site among a search engine’s results. Great, SEO win! But that’s not really the full story. They usually go on to say that landing on our site began a long relationship with our content, sometimes lasting years, that preceded becoming a client. These people’s extended use of our site speaks to the high value of our content to them. But what this ultimately shows is that, no matter how long their “vetting” process, a site’s visitors offer very little value to you until you have converted them to prospects. So, think about this in terms of your site: How much site traffic is actually converted and where does it come from?
More conversions come from human referrals than from search engine traffic.
Take a moment to let that sink in. More conversions come from human referrals than from search engine traffic. Knowing that our site received the vast majority of its traffic from search engine referrals, and that we performed quite well for phrases directly related to what we do, like “defining a web content strategy,” “how to do SEO,” or “website development pricing,” I would have assumed that most of the people subscribing to our newsletter, registering for our webinars, or requesting meetings with us are referred by search engines. But after reviewing the data, I have concluded that this is not the case at all.
The image above depicts the 9 top referrers of traffic to our website, showing how many unique visits and eventual conversions came from each over the past 6 months. As expected, the top referrer to our site, exceeding direct visits by almost 5 times, was search engine traffic (Google, Yahoo, and Bing). However, out of the 71, 233 visitors who came to our site from a search engine, only 333 of them ended up converting to an actual lead. That’s a paltry fraction of a percent (.47%). Our miscellaneous referrals, on the other hand, which include any other website on the web that has chosen to link to us, deliver far fewer visitors by comparison to search but far more conversions. Out of the 10,350 visitors that came from direct links to our site on other websites, 475 ended up converting to actual leads. That’s 4.5%- almost 10 times the percentage by proportion of conversions originating with search!
While I can’t say for certain that my conclusions about our site traffic would apply to every other company like ours, I’d bet it’s pretty likely. When you stop to consider why search traffic delivers fewer conversions than other referrals, the data makes perfect sense. Think about it: When you search for something online, you scrutinize the results for relevance before you choose one to click, and even then, you often realize that the site you’ve visited isn’t quite what you’re looking for. No hard feelings; you don’t expect search engine bots to organize the web based upon just what you want. That would be like going to your local library and finding a card catalog with your name on it. But when a site you trust links to another site, you do expect that recommendation to be much more closely aligned with your interests and intent than a search engine’s results to your query. You assume that the people behind that website are like you, and when they link to another site, it’s for a really good reason. They’ve read its content and found it valuable enough to recommend to you. Put simply, people trust people and people act upon trust.
I think the chart above makes this principle very clear, but if you need any further evidence of how direct human referrals lead to more conversions, read what happened when Smashing Magazine referred to our site among its list of useful email web design newsletters.
By Ben Fry, an illustration for SEED Magazine:
Sequences of human DNA aligned with about a dozen other mammals, created as an illustration for Seed Magazine. The data is from the Mammalian Genome Project at theBroad Institute. This is real alignment data, based on a more “functional” tool that browses this data… In each block, the top (white) row is human DNA, additional rows are ordered roughly in their “evolutionary distance” from humans. First row after human is chimp, then rhesus macaque (rhesus monkey), elephant, dog, armadillo, cavia (basically a guinea pig), cow, and so on, down to monodelphis (opossum). Letters are colored when they differ from human, with Ts and As in red, Cs and Gs in blue.
This image comes from a very cool demonstration of an IBM concept for Intelligent Transporation Systems using realtime sensor data. It links to the IBM landing page for their “Smart Traffic” proposal. They get to the point:
Building new roads and new lanes often just isn’t possible any longer, but building intelligence into the roads and the cars—with roadside sensors, radio frequency tags, and global positioning systems—certainly is.
Also (and this is a digression), check out that snazzy menu of all of IBM’s “A Smarter Planet” topics on the landing page. RAD:
![From Information Aesthetics:
The data.gov.uk Newspaper [newspaperclub.co.uk] is a tangible prototype of a potential service targeting people who recently moved into a new area, and shows information about the area, such as local services, environmental information, crime statistics, travel times, transportation options, education and healthcare.](http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_krx3qfcUMK1qzw5oyo1_500.jpg)
From Information Aesthetics:
The data.gov.uk Newspaper [newspaperclub.co.uk] is a tangible prototype of a potential service targeting people who recently moved into a new area, and shows information about the area, such as local services, environmental information, crime statistics, travel times, transportation options, education and healthcare.
Two weeks ago, I posted a chart showing the various categories among the 25 articles I had read that week. Then last week, I posted a second chart comparing that weeks data with the previous one.
This week, I’m comparing the past three weeks. Some of the categories from previous weeks have been consolidated into more general ones (i.e. ‘Carl Jung’ has become ‘Psychology,’ and ‘Artists’ has become ‘Art’). Art and Tech Trends are up, Futurism is down.
I also noticed that I’m tending to read an average of 25 articles per week.
