Google’s new Trends search is a lot of fun, and useful too. See how some things have taken off over the past couple of years, like Web 2.0: and Wikipedia (the lower graph is for volume of related pieces on Google News, the upper for ordinary Search): while others, such as WiMax, are more gradual: … Read more
We probably didn’t need an academic study to tell us this, but the figures are still quite surprising: The University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering has, in a study released today, found that chat room participants with female usernames received 25 times more threatening and/or sexually explicit private messages than those with … Read more
WorldCom, once the U.S.’ second largest long distance phone company before falling into bankruptcy and fraud convictions, is no more. At least, as a name. As Netcraft, a UK-based Internet monitoring and security company, records: WorldCom.com has been taken offline, erasing the web’s last traces of the brand that became a symbol of white collar … Read more
Google’s new Finance site is worth a look, but it’s only when you look at the graphs do you realise how good it is. Take this snippet from the chart on the Apple page: The overall chart is a great example of beauty and graphical simplicity. The letters correspond to a scrolling column of stories that … Read more
This is the week of hobbyhorses. I love sparklines though I’ve been very lazy in actually trying to make more use of them. Sparklines are simple little graphs that can pepper text to illustrate data. I went through a phase of using them a year ago on media coverage of technical stuff, the excessive online … Read more