I've been working here too long

My first reaction on seeing this beautiful website...

... Who's it a campaign for?

It's from a Spanish band called Labuat, and I'm thoroughly ashamed of myself even if it is sort of a campaign. Note to self: not everybody is trying to sell something all the time.

Is it art?

The MIT SENSEable City Lab has been visualising phone calls made during Obama's inauguration.

It's very pretty.

But what's it for? I've been wondering this about more and more data visualisations, which are impressive, but don't leave you knowing anything more than that the creator can make beautiful visualisations.

This one is on the margin.


It's beautiful and does communicate a simple message; Britain's skies are very, very busy. If you were just told that, then it would have a lot less impact, so the visualisation is useful as well as beautiful. We use charts for the same reason - either to communicate more information than you can cope with in a written description, or to make a greater impact.

Stunning data visualisation is seductive in our business, but in business it's going to have to work harder than this. An amazing graphic will work to impress a client once, before they realise that they can't acually do anything with it. Good for pitches, but not much else.

The really great business visualisations are ones like these - everything you need to know about a topic on one page. Now that's what we should be aiming for.

(original link)

Anyone for a pint?

Media types are officially the heaviest drinkers in the country, the Depatment of Health says so.
Teachers are the most likely to moderate their drinking.

As a good analyst who doesn't just present the data, I've come up with two hypotheses...

Either:

(a) When you're nursing a hangover, it's more palateable to face a Marketing Director than a class of 12 year olds.

or

(b) With twenty odd days holiday a year rather than every third month off, us media types really need that drink.

Further research is needed into this important question. If you need me, I'll be in the pub.

Marketing a phenomenon

Anybody know what Spotify has spent on marketing since 2006? Go on, have a guess.
From a standing start in October 2008, it had a a million users by the following March and is still growing fast. You can't launch like that without some serious marketing back-up.

Got a number in your head?

The correct answer is £5000. Yes, that's it.

When your marketing return on investment numbers come back and they're not good, should you really be blaming the creative and claiming that radio isn't the right channel? Or maybe looking hard at the product.

You'd fail an essay paper for doing this

The web's already been excited about Wolfram Alpha, then ridiculed it and will shortly move on to the Next Big Thing.

As an analyst, I thought it might be a useful resource. If you type in something like 'UK GDP' you certainly get a nice time series of very useful looking data, but there's a major problem.

Take this query for The Times newspaper.

I don't get loads of information back, but the circulation's not a bad start. Where did this number come from? And here's the problem. If you click source information, you're told 'Wolfram Alpha curated data, 2009' and given some extra 'background sources and references', none of which point directly to the circulation figure.

Wolfam Alpha doesn't audit newspaper circulations, and if I'm going to use this number then I have to be able to say where it came from. Wikipedia occasionally comes in for abuse when used as a serious research tool, but at least it lists its sources.

To be honest, I find scraping the web for information and then listing yourself as the primary source of that information, more than a little cheeky. Wikipedia must be fuming.

And the award for most politically incorrect ad goes to...

Axe Korea, for wrapping a female students' dormitory block with a calendar.
Have to admit, I think this is funny. There's no way you'd get away with it in the UK, but it's funny all the same.

Whatever happened to the sense of humour our Lynx ads used to have?

What datamonkeys will be using in 2010

Some screenshots of Office 2010 have leaked out early.

Leaks like this are normally a strictly geeks only affair (which is why I read the sorts of websites they get leaked on,) but when it's Office and we all spend half our working lives using it, I think the screenshots are worth a peek.

I've also been looking at web design this week and what makes a site look good. The biggest thing that stands out about good design is minimalism. If something's on a page, then does it need to be? If it needs to be, then could it be simpler? It's an approach that Microsoft could learn from.

Yes, Office 2010 has still got the menu ribbon.



This doesn't just fail the minimalism test, it goes to the pub instead of revising, sleeps through its alarm clock and then misses the test altogether. It's huge! And isn't any easier to use for being huge.

OK, so I'm at the technical end of Excel users, but 2007 (and now 2010) look like the menu was designed by Playmobil. It might be easier for your first five minutes with the software, but after that it's just really, really annoying. Traditional menus are far from perfect, but they're better than the ribbon.

Any chance of Microsoft biting the bullet and admitting they've got this one very, very wrong? Answers on a postcard.