• LBi confirms redundancies in design and build departments
  LBi is the UK's largest digital marketing agency and a competitor of ours. It's just laid off 17 of its 420-strong workforce – the layoffs affected the design and build disciplines. Ewen Sturgeon, the CEO, seems to indicate that the redundancies are pre-emptive and not reactive
  (tags: layoffs economics08)

• Online Shopping to Plateau As Slump Hits Cyberspace – WSJ.com
  Christoper Lawton of the Wall Street Journal on expected performance of online retail in the 2008 peak season. In recent years retailers have seen double-digit year-on-year revenue growth. Until recently there had been a hope that growth would be only slightly diminished by the economic downturn – but data from the first 23 days of November indicates otherwise. Only a late surge in online sales will deliver anything other than a 0-1% rise from 2007.
  (tags: ecommerce articles online retail)
• British electronic music in the 1960s
  Blog post from Gutterbreakz discussing the recent hoo-hah about the Beatles previously unreleased "experimental" track, Carnival of Light. In short – who cares? Britain actually had a vibrant electronic experimentation scene in that period which was operating perfectly well even without the attentions of bandwagon-jumping popular musicians. Sadly not all of it exists in recorded form, but if you're interested this post contains a few names well worth tracking down
  (tags: music)

• Interview with Brian Oakes
  Brian Oakes was the graphic designer behind the infographics on IOUSA, a film that achieves the near-impossible in explaining the US national debt and problem it poses. This is an interview with him
  (tags: infographics economics visualisation)

Last night I watched IOUSA on the BBC iPlayer (unfortunately this was over cable TV – I can’t find it on the web iPlayer). It’s a film made by the former US Comptroller General, David Walker, which attempts to convince the viewer of the seriousness of America’s national debt problem.

…and it worked on me. The most effective aspect of the film was its use of infographics to convey a sense of historical scale. At its core was a recurring animated graphic showing the national debt from America’s inception through to the end of the George W Bush era in 2008.

Early on in the film you see the rises in the national debt from $0 in 1835 (the only point in history when it hit zero) up until the start of World War One. After that the graphic has to keep zooming out to fit in the subsequent growth. The Great Depression sees a quite unnerving hike – but as the World War Two period looms into view, it looks like a sheer cliff face. This is a shot of the graphic running up until 1988:

In the Clinton era the debt comes down, but then Bush takes charge in 2000 and things go through the roof, rocketing past WW2’s peak. The final sequence involving this graphic displays a projection for debt growth through to 2040. Baby boomers are set to retire en masse shortly and the effect on Social Security and Medicare spending will not be good. The effect this has on the infographic – the drastic zoom needed to chart the debt up to 2040 – almost gave me a sense of vertigo. It paints a pretty dystopian vision of the future.

Even though the film is unlikely to contain any new information for someone with more than an advanced lay knowledge of the current economic situation, I’d strongly recommend watching it. As well as the extremely well designed and animated graphics, it does a remarkably effective job of communicating the seriousness of the situation even to viewers who are already aware of most of the facts.

• Will the Real Information Architect Please Stand Up? – SlideShare
  An engaging and entertaining presentation by Gail Leija that explores who information architects are as well as what it is that they actually do.
  (tags: ia presentation)

• The LHC and the Bizarre Behaviour of the BBC | The Lay Scientist
  Details leak out about the story behind the BBC's strange focus on "Red Button Day", September 10th, and how its odd coverage of the LHC's "turn-on" resulted from a generalised incomprehension of the subject matter. Of "particular" (ho-ho) interest to physicists
  (tags: media bbc physics)

In this post, I’m going to try to outline a convergence between two separate trains of thoughts. It might get messy, so bear with me.

Train one (think of this as the Edgware branch of the Northern Line) is search engine optimisation.

One of the areas I’ve been working in a lot recently is search engine optimisation. I’ve carried out three fairly in-depth assessments of different search markets in the last few weeks.

It’s been an interesting learning experience in a lot of ways—the last time I was heavily involved in SEO was a few years ago and the tools available for carrying out analysis have come a long way since then. Perhaps the most potent new weapon in the arsenal of a search market analyst is Google Trends. Try it, it’s fun.

Train two (this is the High Barnet branch) is corporate social responsibility (CSR).

For a while now I’ve held the view that companies are not doing enough just throwing money at CSR initiatives—donating to charity, that sort of thing. After all, money isn’t the only thing that successful companies have to contribute. They are also rich in expertise and capability. Companies should therefore look for ways to apply their know-how to social problems.

An example of this that I often refer to is TNT Express Worldwide’s work with the World Food Programme. It assigns staff to work with the WFP and contributes its expertise in the fields of distribution and logistics, helping to manage the distribution of food in geographically remote and challenging regions. The value of this contribution is inestimably higher than it would be if it were purely financial.

And here’s where the two trains of thought converge. To torture an already stretched metaphor, imagine this as being Camden Town station.

Google launched Google.org some time ago as its philanthropic arm. It’s headed by epidemiologist/technologist Dr Larry Brilliant and seeks to do the sort of thing that TNT are doing with the WFP, namely using Google’s unique capabilities to bring a fresh approach to various social problems.

A great example of this is the recently launched Google Flu Trends, an analysis of how Google Trends can help point to flu outbreaks around two weeks than conventional epidemiological analysis.

It’s nice to see companies bringing knowledge and not just money to the table when it comes to health, hunger and other real-world problems.

• 50 websites you'll wonder how you lived without | News | TechRadar UK
  A fairly huge list of websites and web utilities, a lot of which do look genuinely useful. From browser-based equivalents of Excel and Visio to project management and online file backup services.
  (tags: websites utilities tools)

• Make a Local Backup Of Your Gmail Account
  Are you a heavy user of Gmail? It's handy to have so much information in one place isn't it? Phone numbers, addresses, logins for various websites, and so on, and all nicely searchable too. But what if your account got disabled? It happens, and it happened to someone close to me once. She had to effectively reboot her online life. It's worth taking steps to make sure your gmail information is backed up locally.
  (tags: tutorials software technology tools howto)
• Nosedigg: Our collection of amazing underwater
  Collection of underwater photographs, including beluga whales and a Bengal tiger looking ready to take on a shark
  (tags: photography underwater)

• Fleshmap: Studies of Desire
  A somewhat racy exercise in visualisation, using heatmaps and other techniques to display statistical information about erogenous zones, common nipple patterns and the occurrence of body parts in song titles, by genre. The hand is most mentioned in blues songs, apparently, while hip-hop artists are obsessed with the behind.
  (tags: sex psychology visualisation)
• Tag Galaxy
  This 3D Flash site utilises a visual metaphor based around the solar system to display tag relationships from Flickr. Related tags "orbit" the core tag and matching photographs form the surfaces of the "planets".
  (tags: 3d images visualisation)
• Browse the Web in 3D with Pogo | MakeUseOf.com
  A 3D web browser that I've yet to try.
  (tags: 3d browser internet)
• Vid2mp3
  A useful online tool for extracting audio from video files embedded in websites
  (tags: audio conversion)