This Yahoo Research project is the sort of tool they use to teach time travelers and aliens like Mike Myers and Mila Jovovich about history. This begs the question: if Yahoo Research is working on products for time travelers and aliens, is that getting too far out ahead of the market?
a time-based data visualization showing the evolution of tags within the Flickr online image sharing community.
the “river” metaphor gives a quick overview of the tags as a function of time. tags appear from right of the screen, travel left slowly, & disappear. the font size of the tag is proportional to the intensity of its interestingnes. each tag displays 1 photo from Flickr with this tag, & can be user selected to show more images.
the “waterfall” metaphor is useful to study tags that persist across multiple days. the screen is divided into left & right halves. the top 8 most interesting tags are displayed in 8 rows in the left half, with font sizes proportional to the intensities of their interestingness. if a tag persists for more than 1 consecutive day, more photos are added to its row.
[yahoo.com & www2006.org(pdf)]
Originally from information aesthetics by reBlogged by micah to on May 25, 2006, 5:51PM