3 out of 7: Gell on crowds & visualization

This is a three-in-one post: Just skimming Gell’s weblog and couldn’t help but link three of his seven most recent postings. Good stuff you found there, Gell:

Google Gap Minder

The Google Gapminder (beta, of course) allows us “to make sense of the world by having fun with statistics”. It’s also a pretty cool resource.

Swarm the dot com

Swarm, The on the other hand visualizes traffic, live. Well, sort of. At least it’s supposed to.

Swarm shows you what websites people are visiting, right now. Swarm is a graphical map of hundreds of websites, all connecting to each other. It updates itself every second with where people are going and coming from. As sites become more popular, they move towards the center of the swarm and grow larger. Conversely, sites that lose traffic move away from the center and grow smaller.

Neat!

But it is No 3 which I find kind of scary. (Mostly because it’s so true, I guess.) Jeff Howe’s article on Wired tells us about Crowdsourcing. What is this?

Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D.

Read on: Wired.com > Wired Mag > Jeff Howe

(via Gell 1, 2 and 3.)

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