BlogmyQuery – BMQ

Mood Map -- a visualisation of the world's mood

Data visualisation is a strange art. You almost have to approach it like a science.

When you begin, there's a huge mountain of data lying there. Opaque, impenetrable. In order to make sense of it you have to chance a guess; form a hypothesis. Once you have that hypothesis you have somewhere to begin; a way to start analysing your data. And it isn't till you've finished analysing it that you know whether there's anything worth visualising. It's one big fishing trip.

And so it was with Mood Map.

My hypothesis: Key events that occur in the real world would be reflected in people's communications (Twitter). When there was an earthquake there would be global empathy. When there was a world changing announcement, a global rejoicing.

My method: Every minute, sample the public timeline of Twitter for tweets with positive or negative emoticons. It's not a particularly foolproof way of measuring mood, but hey, I'm not a statistician or a text analysis specialist. Once I've got the tweets, geocode them and place them on a map, clustered according to volume and coloured according mood.

My conclusion: After gathering six months of data, monitoring world events, and analysing it all through my custom visualisation engine I've not discovered much. (Or maybe that means I have?) There's no empathy, no rejoicing. Everyone's pretty much wrapped up in themselves. (At least on Twitter <sarcasm>News Flash!</sarcasm>)

There's definitely no patterns I can discern on a global scale. You can see Mood Map at the time of the 2010 Haiti earthquake or the 2010 Chile earthquake. In both cases there's no discernible dent in global happiness, however it is possible to notice localised mood effects. For example there's a noticeable red dot in Poland when the Polish president died in a plane crash, and a smattering of unhappy Europeans while Eyjafjallajokull was erupting. But on the whole, the World stays at a steady 85 - 90% happiness day in day out.

I'll keep the data churning over for a while longer and see if any other patterns emerge, but for the moment it seems like it's best as a tool for spotting local (country-wide) mood fluctuations. If you take a look through the archives and spot something interesting, let me know!

I think it’s always a good idea to take a step back and ask yourself why you’re doing something. So right now I’m taking a step back to rethink Warpspire.

Getting rid of cruft

The other day I followed a link to a blog post on Mint. I was presented with this screen:

I hate what most designers have done to the web. You’d think people would be taking cues from things like Readability and Safari Reader, but they’re not. People are throwing more and more crap onto each page and making things harder and harder to read.

Anyways, it got me to thinking about sites that I continue to enjoy reading in the browser. One site that immediately came to mind is Daring Fireball. The format and presentation has lasted for years without feeling tired or hard to read. So it should come as no suprise that this new layout mirrors DF in a great number of ways. (Alas, my logo features the same unicode character as DF — something which has now turned from a funny coincidence to a long boring story. I hate logos.)

This new layout is the simplest layout I’ve ever had on one of my sites. The goal was to create a focused place for my ideas.

Abandoning old baggage

There was a lot of crap on Warpspire. WordPress tells me the first post was published August 15, 2004. That’s six years ago. To say that the web is a different place now is an understatement. I remember debugging that initial site on IE5 for Mac. Six years ago, I was in my 2nd year of studying Civil Engineering at Cal Poly. I had no concept of the value of the web or how important it would be come. I was also twenty years old, angsty and wrong about many things.

So I deleted most of my posts.

What’s left? The most popular posts (traffic wise) along with a couple of ones that I particularly enjoyed and still felt relevant. I’ve also edited them all, and rewritten some.

Almost certainly a bad idea for my traffic, but probably a good idea for my readership. And I’ll value readers over pageviews any day.

On the subject of comments

The thing about comments is that commentors tend to be a bunch of crazies wandering the internet like it’s a zombie apocolypse. It’s a striking contrast to the rational human beings whom I have sensible arguments with here in the meatspace.

The thing is, I’ve met some of the smartest people on the planet through my site and I don’t want to lose that. So here’s the deal: you send me email, and I send you one back. If I think others might be interested in what you have to say, I’ll post it here on Warpspire.

A comment should mean something to you and it should mean something to me. Typical blog comments just stopped meaning anything to me a long time ago and that sucks. So I’m hoping this is a move toward fixing that.