Marketing Libero

I love wordle.net

I am fairly obsessed with data-visualisation and telling stories. A part of the digital age is the creation, storage and analysis of different kinds of data. We need new techniques.

Excell is great for numbers and graphs but it lacks a certain creativity. 

What about analysing and visualising words?

At wordle.net you can do just that. By simply cutting and pasting in a section of text it creates graphic "clouds" of words where size is proportional to frequency. It is surprisingly effective.

One of my own favourites is below. You have a number of options for analysis when considering the question - who are the most successful international football teams in the history of the World Cup?

Looking at teams who have made the semi-final you could  - produce a table, build a complex score and graph it or simply do this...

Faster, Faster, Faster?

Yesterday the government produced its report dubbed Digital Britain. One of the key points attracting most attention was the promise to ensure that every home in the UK can get 2Mbps broadband by 2012.

In the age of 50Mbps super-fast fibre-optic broadband this doesn't seem like much of a commitment - although the graphic below shows that you can do most things with your 2Mbps.

On reflection - and whilst we all want to have fun - this seems a very trivial list of activities. In Japan which tops the high-speed list they are beginning to ask what can be done with all this bandwidth.

For me where it gets interesting is when the infrastructure starts to facilitate real social change such as workable telecommuting (with usable video-conferencing) and remote interaction with public services such as healthcare. 

The Law of Disruption curve below shows that all elements of society lag considerably behind technological advancement - with the political sphere bringing up the rear.

For me a government serious about a Digital Britain would have been more ambitious - 50Mbps fibre-optic broadband for every household by 2012 is more like it. For that it might have been worth paying a levy.