DJ Earworm has released his 2012 mashup collection ahead of schedule (usually released on Christmas day) and it’s another belter!
The mashup features the 25 biggest hits during 2012 in the U.S.
Gotye and Kimbra – Somebody That I Used To Know
Fun. – Some Nights
Carly Rae Jepsen – Call Me Maybe
Maroon 5 – One More Night
Fun. and Janelle Monáe – We Are Young
Maroon 5 and Wiz Khalifa – Payphone
Ellie Goulding – Lights
Rihanna – Diamonds
Bruno Mars – Locked Out Of Heaven
Ke$Ha – Die Young
Kelly Clarkson – Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You)
Flo Rida – Good Feeling
Nicki Minaj – Starships
The Wanted – Glad You Came
Adele – Set Fire To The Rain
Lumineers – Ho Hey
One Direction – What Makes You Beautiful
Flo Rida and Sia – Wild Ones
Phillip Phillips – Home
Bruno Mars – It Will Rain
Katy Perry – Wide Awake
Alex Clare – Too Close
PSY – Gangnam Style
Taylor Swift – We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together
Flo Rida – Whistle
As part of his PdD research at the University College London’s Geography Dept., James Cheshire has produced a series of interactive maps of London show the relationship of common surnames to different London neighborhoods.
This map shows the 15 most frequent surnames in each Middle Super Output Area (MSOA) across Greater London. The colours represent the origin of the surname (*not necessarily* the person) derived from UCL’s Onomap Classification tool. The surnames have also been scaled by their total frequency in each MSOA.
He concludes:
The more you study these maps the more interesting, and perhaps complex, they become. My final thoughts therefore appear a little contradictory. The first is that a surprising number of Londoners share the same name (especially with their immediate neighbours). The second is that despite the dominance of relatively few surnames at the top of the rankings, the further down the rankings you get the more you see of London’s population diversity.
Kirby Ferguson, a New York-based filmmaker on why ‘Everything is a remix’. His fantastic series on the absurdity of modern day copyright is available here.
Part 4 of Kirby Ferguson’s Everything is a Remix series investigating social evolution and the meaning of copyright. To watch the entire series, check out Everything is a Remix.
For more on Patent trolls, check out This American Life’s excellent podcast on the companies that ‘amass huge troves of patents and make money by threatening lawsuits’.
There has been lots of reviews of the best visualizations of 2011. FlowingData’s collection is particularly good and represents a wide variety of the best data graphics and animations around. Others such as those from Visual.ly, Fastcodedesign and Visualizing.org highlight the vast array of incredible infographics and data visualizations created during the year.
My top ten are listed below with a brief description and link to the originals.
1. Twitter map showing traffic surges after Japan tsunami
Twitter saw a huge 500% increase in Tweets from Japan as people reached out to friends, family and loved ones in the moments after the March 2011 earthquake. This video above shows the volume of @replies traveling into and out of Japan in a one-hour period just before and then after the earthquake. Replies directed to users in Japan are shown in pink; messages directed at others from Japan are shown in yellow.
This video above displays worldwide retweets of Tweets originating in Japan for one hour after the earthquake. Senders’ original Tweets are shown in red; Tweets retweeted by their followers in the hour after the event are displayed in green.
BBC Software engineer Gareth Lloyd scraped all geotagged Wikipedia articles with time attached to them in order to create a glimpse of the evolution of the world. The video above is based on a mapping over time of 14,200 events listed on Wikipedia.
Events begin in 499 BC, when the first documented historical events appear in Europe. We then move onto the middle mark which shows activity in Asia. 1492 is when Columbus sailed to the new world, and there’s a burst of activity worldwide. The present day shows an image of activity resembling a modern map.
The New York Times Lab Cascade project describes itself as a tool to ‘allow for the precise analysis of the structures which underly sharing activity on the web’.
Cascade allows for precise analysis of the structures which underly sharing activity on the web. This first-of-its-kind tool links browsing behavior on a site to sharing activity to construct a detailed picture of how information propagates through the social media space. While initially applied to New York Times stories and information, the tool and its underlying logic may be applied to any publisher or brand interested in understanding how its messages are shared.
The video below represents what a cascade for a typical article looks like:
The map is used well to show general location, but it fades into the background since it is not the most important information. The bar charts show great data about quantity, and the venn diagrams show how those quantities overlap each other.
The Guardian’s London riots animation highlights how misinformation spread on Twitter during a time of crisis. It shows how these rumors are born, spread, and are corrected on one of the fastest social networks around.
The analysis done by the team is great, and calls out some pivotal events in the timeline of each rumor. As the timeline progresses, the main visualization grows and changes like popcorn, showing the interaction of different rumor threads.
This fantastic visualization from Derek Watkins hows how ‘formal US territorial control expanded in North America from 1700 to 1900, as seen through changes in the spatial distribution of post offices’.
Each year, graphic designer Nicholas Felton creates an “annual report” summarizing an entire year of his life through a series of charts and graphs. For 2010, instead of representing his own life he captured the entire life of his father, Gunter, who died last September.
It used hundreds of small, location aware tags attached to different types of trash to follow progress of trash through city’s waste management system. These revealed the stunning final journey of everyday trash in a series of real time visualizations. The project represented “an initial investigation into understanding the ‘removal-chain’ in urban areas and it represents a type of change that is taking place in cities: a bottom-up approach to managing resources and promoting behavioral change through pervasive technologies”.
This map visualizes all bikes of the public hire schemes in London and many other cities throughout the world. The animated map displays information on the distribution of all the checkin points, the level of use at any given time and the availability of bicycles at each point.
Along with the interactive map, there is a superb real-time animation of the use of bikes in London.
Earlier this year an Austrian law student Max Schrems sent a request to Facebook to provide him with all his personal data. As Facebook has its European Operations center within the EU – in Dublin, Ireland – it must conform to EU law, and thus was obliged to provide all the data it stored about him.
Facebook sent Max received a CD containing about 1,222 pages (PDF files). This included deleted chats and other interactions dating back to 2008. This data was then visualized by Berlin-based newspaper taz.de.
A mashup of the 25 biggest hits during 2011 in the U.S from DJ Earworm.
To download the mp3 download and for more information check out DJ Earworm.com.
Music and videos from
Adele – Rolling In The Deep
Adele – Someone Like You
Black Eyed Peas – Just Can’t Get Enough
Bruno Mars – Grenade
Bruno Mars – The Lazy Song
Britney Spears – Till The World Ends
Cee Lo Green – F* You
Enrique Iglesias – Tonight (I’m Lovin’ You)
Foster the People – Pumped Up Kicks
Jennifer Lopez – On The Floor
Jeremih feat. 50 cent – Down On Me
Katy Perry – Firework
Katy Perry – E.T.
Katy Perry – Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)
Lady Gaga – Born This Way
LMFAO – Party Rock Anthem
LMFAO – Sexy and I Know It
Lupe Fiasco – The Show Goes On
Maroon 5 – Moves Like Jagger
Nicki Minaj – Super Bass
OneRepublic – Good Life
Pink – Raise Your Glass
Pitbull – Give Me Everything
Rihanna – S&M
Rihanna – We Found Love
Infographics