Three Incredible Infographics

Infographics are amazing. They are a fast and easy way to convey a large amount of information quickly and succinctly, as you can see by this, you guessed it, an infographic explaining infographics. Which by the way, useful as it is, I'm not including it as one of my three incredible infographics because it's not new.

Created by Customer Magnetism, an award winning Digital Marketing Agency.

I wrote a blog post last year, Infographics: The Graphic Visual Explosion, and if anything, I'd say infographics have become even more popular in the last nine months.

Here are three of the most incredible infographics I've seen pass through my feeds this week, and I can't help but share the wealth; something most social media practitioners seem almost supernaturally compelled to do. (Hmmm, I think there's a blog post here.... every time I see an amazing article, image or infographic I immediately start mentally crafting my tweet or Facebook post about it.)

I can't decide which of these is my favorite, so I'd love to hear which one you like the best.

This first one, designed by Marketo, which shows us some of the numbers associated with cat and bacon searches, is utterly brilliant. Social Media Today has a great article, Why Marketing That Includes Cats and Bacon Is the Cat’s Meow, that actually suggests some ways you can integrate these popular cat and bacon memes into your small business marketing plan.

The second one, created by eBay Deals, illustrates 16 examples of viral philanthropy, via crowdfunding sites such as indiegogo.com, giveforward.com and gofundme.com, and even reddit, for the victims of natural disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes, victims of large-scale shootings, and others who have pulled some heartstrings.

This is a screenshot of the top of a very long and narrow infographic.Click on the link above to see it all.

The final one in my trifecta of favorites is Every Second on the Internet, a brilliant and interactive infographic from designly.com showing, in real-time visuals, how much data is streaming through the Internet every single second. You have to see it in action — this still shot doesn't begin to do it justice.

This also is just a screenshot of a tiny part of the entire piece. Click on the link aboveto see it all.

This is just the beginning, and we'll continue to see great strides in function and creativity. Infographics do not translate well to mobile, nor are the majority of them, including these, accessible in their current form to people with visual disabilities.

Infographics: The Graphic Visual Explosion

The exponential growth of social media channels and the popularity of graphics and visuals on those channels has spawned a new visual format on steroids with a new name: infographics.

Like many social fans and practitioners, I enjoy how clever and informative infographics can be, and try to collect the ones I like on Pinterest. Today's find was this one about which profession drinks the most coffee.  It seemed quite fitting, since
1) I love coffee,
2) I drink a lot of coffee, and
3) my profession overlaps both categories 2 and 4.

Once I started down this blog path, I googled "infographics" to get some sense of how many infographics have been created in the last couple of years and if someone has counted/cataloged them. 14 million results were returned for my search. Yes, 14 million. Seriously? And the quick survey I took of the links showed that some of them were for multiple infographics.

So after Google, my next stop was Wikipedia of course, which included this definition:

Information graphics or infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge intended to present complex information quickly and clearly. They can improve cognition by utilizing graphics to enhance the human visual system’s ability to see patterns and trends. The process of creating infographics can be referred to as data visualization, information design and information architecture.

It made me think of a class I took years ago that used two of Edward R. Tufte's books: Envisioning Information and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. They're beautifully printed books, but they haven't left my bookshelf in years before tonight. (I'm going to look through them this weekend now that they've caught my eye again.)

UX and design practitioners are probably very familiar with his work, but I looked him up and was amazed at his expertise and list of works. (I don't think I appreciated the one-day course I took those many years ago nearly enough.)

I remember very little about the class, but what I remember clearly is the poster we received of Napoleon's March of 1812, a graphic by Charles Joseph Minard, which was published in 1869. I liked it so much that I had it mounted and framed, and still have it hanging on a wall in my house. I pulled it down to take a fresh look at it, and I'm impressed all over again.

Tufte's website states about Minard's work: "Probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn, this map by Charles Joseph Minard portrays the losses suffered by Napoleon's army in the Russian campaign of 1812."

The poster includes this description in the legend: "Six variables are plotted: the size of the army, its location on a two-dimensional surface, direction of the army's movement, and temperature on various dates during the retreat from Moscow."

Almost 150 years ago, Menard visualized, and created by hand, a complex visualization that is as compelling today as it was then. I'm a little less impressed by the coffee consumption infographic from this morning, just because it is one-dimensional, and pales in comparison to Menard's masterpiece. I'll continue to be amused by today's infographics, but now that I've revisited this classic, it's going to take a lot more to impress me.

Image 1 source: http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/180x5gza1jl9rjpg/original.jpg
Image 2 source: http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters
Alt text for image 2 : <This information is included on the poster>
Napoleon's March to Moscow  The War of 1812
This classic of Charles Joseph Manard (1781 - 1870), the French engineer, shows the terrible fate of Napoleon's army in Russia. Described by E. J. Marey as seeming to defy the pen of the historian by its brutal eloquence, this combination of data map and time-series, drawn in 1861, portrays the devastating losses supffered in Napoleon's Russian campaign of 1812. Beginning at the left on the Polish-Russian border near the Neimen River, the thick band shows the size of the army (422,000 men) as it invaded Russia in June 1812. The width of the band indicates the size of th army at each place on the map. In September, the army reached Moscow, which was by then sacked and deserted, with 100,000 men. The path of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow is depicted by the darker, lower band, which is linked to a temperature scale and dates at the bottom of the chart. It was a bitterly cold winter, and many froze on the march out of Russia. As the graphic shows, the crossing of the Berezina River was a diasaster, and the army finally struggled back into Poland with only 10,000 men remaining. Also shown are the movements of auxiliary troops, as they sought to protect the rear and the flank of th advancing army. Minard's graphic tells a rich, coherent story with its multivariate data, far more enlightening than just a single number bouncing along over time. Six variables are plotted: the size of the army, its location on a two-dimensional surface, direction of the army's movement, and temperature on various dates during the retreat from Moscow

More Americans Are on Facebook Than Have Passports (and What It Means to Our Brains)

Yes, that is a true statistic, according to a report I found today from Social Times, where they created some bullets and presented some interesting statistics, which it turns out they grabbed from a huge infographic from the team responsible for a new and not-yet-launched site called Tripl. Check out the ginormous infographic yourself here, or I can summarize that part of it really quickly for you:

155,000,000 Americans are on Facebook communicating with friends & family
but only
115,000,000 Americans own a passport and can travel outside the U.S.

So if I'm understanding this infographic correctly, 50% of the U.S. population is on Facebook, yet only 37% have a passport.  (You know, if you haven't yet, take a look at it — it's an impressive infographic, I have to say. And there's a lot more information than just about Facebook and passports. You can find out what percentage of the social networking travelers connect to their social graphs while traveling, which airlines have the most Facebook likes, etc, etc.)

And when I first saw that headline, I was intrigued. Wow, that's really something, right? But now that I've got it sorted out, pondered it for a minute or two, I have to say what I'm thinking, which is, "So what?" At the end of the day what am I going to do with that information? I can tell you. Absolutely nothing. At some point, I might say to someone in a conversation, "Oh, I saw these statistics online that showed that more people are on Facebook than have passports.", but I guarantee you that I won't be able to state the numbers right then and there, because they never actually settled in — I've bookmarked the article for if I ever need the information, so I'm done with it.

An article in the San Jose Mercury News published on 7/14/2011, Google is changing your brain, study says, and don't you forget it, confirmed something that I'd been thinking, at least about myself, for quite a while now, which is that in our now 24/7 wired world, we no longer need to memorize or even know facts and figures if we can look them up. The article confirms this, saying:

When we know where to find information, we're less likely to remember it -- an amnesia dubbed The Google Effect by a team led by psychologist Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University.

Goodbye, soul-searching; hello, facts-at-fingertips.

The finding, published in Friday's issue of the journal Science, doesn't prove that Google, Yahoo, or other search engines are making us dumber, as some have asserted. We're still capable of remembering things that matter -- and are not easily found online, Sparrow said.

Rather, it suggests that the human memory is reorganizing where it goes for information, adapting to new computing technologies rather than relying purely on rote memory. 

We're outsourcing "search" from our brains to our computers.

 So we're not getting dumber, we're just outsourcing some functionality. Whew, what a relief! :-)