What a marvelous, brief examination of history and its forces: Baseball Geography and Transportation. Effectively annotated with dated maps, in an almost schematic method, this article demonstrates the changes wrought on baseball by the move from trains to planes and automobiles. Both the distribution of teams and the shapes of stadiums were disrupted by travel methods. Obvious when you think about it…but I never have.

This is one article I would like to see expanded and fleshed out a bit more. Compare Reisner’s effort to this two-page spread in The Atlantic. Reisner did the hard work of making connections, and forcefully making his point with his illustrations. A touch more work and this goes from remarkable to simply outstanding.

I’ve read much Wallace Stegner, but not his Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil (scroll to the bottom). A future read, certainly.

I don’t need Adventures in $40 eyeglasses right now, but for the future…

Haven’t watched The Kingdom, but the opening credits sequence is nifty. (via)

The best 10 books of the year? So says The New York Times in its 2007 list. Despite my reading, I never even came close to one of this group, and had only heard of two.

I don’t pour myself into Twitter, but I recognize that’s its very open-endedness is a strength. What caught my eye about this analysis was simply its method: pictures and diagrams, in lieu of many words. My education continues.

Who has time to read Draft Business Model Innovation Manual (beta version)? Not me, and I haven’t even downloaded the PDF, but I love the audacity of someone creating a manual for innovation. Clayton Christensen has described innovation and its consequences on businesses wonderfully. But a “manual” implies prescription, which is much, much harder.

Among the least surprising headlines of the year, from December 4, 2007: “Hybrid Vehicle Owners are Wealthy, Active, Educated and Overwhelmingly Democratic, According to Scarborough Research” (PDF available from press page)

Domains are interesting to me. I have seven of my own, though I only use one. DomainTools introduced “Registrant Search,” with an offer of a free self-search. Yup…found them all. But I don’t try and hide.

I’m a sucker for things like this: “human history in 60 seconds.

Joe Jackson is starting another tour and will be in Redwood City in May 2008.

The chapters I enjoyed?

The one on sparklines, which wasn’t a new concept for me, given the lengthy web discussion of same, but since I haven’t read that entire forum, the edited version was most welcome.

The evisceration of PowerPoint was a guilty pleasure. I’ve long felt frustrated by the format, and this was simply backing for my previously held biases (1, 2). Two full pages are simply a paper version of Peter Norvig’s brilliant Gettysburg address. Note: Anil Dash has often written interesting material about business software

I haven’t created a “deck” since joining OpenDNS. I’m pleased with that fact.

But what I was struck by was that Time Machine appears to be the first popular evocation of Lifestreams, the Eric Freeman and David Gelertner attempt to replace the desktop metaphor from a decade ago. By popular, I mean something that people will actually see and (maybe) use. Gelertner’s software company MirrorWorlds appears to have slipped away, and the domain leads to a parked page. So does Scopeware, which was the name of the company in 2003, when I last noticed this idea in the wild.

I wonder if the ideas really are close enough that Apple had to license any patents?

Update: I was not the only one to make this comparison.

• Steven Berlin Johnson: Leopard First Impressions: The Time Machine
• Dave5: WWDC – A Very Scrabble Christmas (see the footnote)
• Dave Rogers: Mac: Seeing Spots

A worthy part of history, and now it will be preserved in various caches for… well, a long time. Some of the sites named are long gone, and no longer well known. Infoseek, for example, where I interviewed in December, 1996, when it was a rising star. Infoseek’s location, a 45 minute drive from San Francisco at off-peak hours, ruled it out by the time I arrived at the building. Some things work out for the best!

In the presentation, there are two tidbits I’m curious about that don’t get explained in Figure 7, Most Lumous Sites (those that link out). The right-hand side of the graph is titled Sites With Pointers from: x1000. The second largest site, after Yahoo, is listed only as an IP address: 197.160.127.201 I wonder what that site was? A reverse DNS lookup tells me nothing, since DNSStuff.com says Asking f.root-servers.net for 201.127.160.197.in-addr.arpa PTR record: Sorry, there is no such zone! On the left-hand side of the graph, Outgoing URLs, x1000, there is a different IP address just over halfway down: 198.147.102.253 Looking that one up via reverse DNS gets caught in a loop, so I’m going to have to remain curious for both of them, or hope that Bray remembers what they might have been and provides an update.

Some of the graphics carry a lot of information, despite their somewhat crude edges. I expect Matthew Hurst would have fun with the original data set (if it still existed), given what he’s showing in exercises like his map of the blogosphere. These pictures don’t always convey all we’d hope, but more fun than words, and visually appealing, too. I have Tufte’s newest, Beautiful Evidence, on order from Amazon. I can’t make beautiful or information-full pictures, but I do enjoy poring over them.

If you do find the written history of technology appealing, don’t forget about How the Web Was Born.

At CNET News.com, What’s Hot is updated with data hourly, and when new stories are published. Some of the Most Popular data is updated in near-real-time, though most is daily.

For so-close-to-real-time it becomes useless (but still interesting), try Digg Spy.

Showing usage back to the users… that’s fun stuff. And it definitely changes behavior.

The problems?

First, the device’s wireless coverage was miserable, in an office building in the heart of San Francisco’s business district. My indicators would either not move or swing inconsistently.

Second, the 30 included faceplates are for non-personal information, like weather, traffic, and market indices. Weather and market indices are mildly interesting, but traffic isn’t generic… which route, etc.

Third, the basic device cost $150.

Fourth, the opportunities to customize what information was displayed were limited. You can pay extra for some faceplates which can be tailored via a dedicated website (# of Yahoo Mail messages, etc.), but true personalization is not available. I bought this device well over a year ago, and even today, the developer specifications are still “in preparation” — that was the case when I bought the device, too.

When I left CNET last month, I left the Ambient Executive Dashboard behind. I hope someone else either found a better use for it or threw it away.

I was reminded of my wasted money when I saw mention a few weeks ago of Violet, a French company whose tagline is “The Smart Object Company.” As long as a device is seen as a toy, or a fashion object, I suppose Violet may deliver up to (lower) expectations, with a digital “rabbit.” At least Violet offers an API (look on the right, for a link to the, sigh, PDF).

Ambient and Velvet are among the few companies I know of that are innovating on analog displays of digital information. I haven’t searched/shopped around, so maybe I’m missing entire industries (not just companies) who are delivering great products and services in this category. Am I? I hope so.

There’s something marvelous about the concept, so although I’ve been burned once, I’m still anxious for someone to amaze me. Think about how many digital displays mimic analog displays because of the comfort and immediate comprehension which results. We’re seeing a promise of more realistic analog control of digital devices with new products like the Nintendo Wii, with its motion-sensitive system (photo). So there is hope for the reverse… digital control of analog displays. Yes, our planes are turning into “fly by wire,” but I’m looking more in the personal gadget realm.

Digital displays themselves open new possibilities, of course, at times far beyond what you can do with analog devices. I still hope that CNET News.com does more with What’s Hot, for instance.

But we’re all still human, with more senses than just sight and sound, so engage us!

Here’s the original post from the author, which I found via Information Design. I’ve already seen this meme picked up by another feed I read, and I expect it will spiral widely.

What will help it spread? First, it’s visual. Second, there is a unique flickr tag: websitesasgraphs. Here’s my contribution to the tag.

Because I’ll lose track otherwise, here’s the Legend.

blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags