Researchers at Cornell University have recently completed a huge study of 1.6 million news sites in which they tracked news stories in the three months leading up to the 2008 U.S. presidential election. They tracked stories on mainstream media sites as well as blogs, and saw some very interesting results. You can read about the [...]

(cross posted at is it luck? and alekseistevens.com?)
My wife does a lot of work with data visualization, in which she extracts patterns and stories from large data sets and represents them visually through graphic design or animation.  It’s a really interesting and elucidating way of making sense out of huge amounts of information; in a [...]

Nieman Lab has a great summary / review of Bill Wasik’s new book, “And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture“. Bill Wasik is the creator of flash mobs, and he discusses the causes / problems of viral memes and the rising use of popularity as a measure of importance in [...]

The Consumerist gives a great rundown of some pretty shocking ads from history, including an ad for asbestos that talks about evacuating the World Trade Center (well before 9/11) and a Bayer Heroin ad!

Wouldn’t it be cool if you had a display on your car’s speedometer that told you what the speed limit is for your current location? Roads could have little wireless transmitters embedded wherever the speed limit changes and your dashboard display would automatically update. In addition, you would see your current speed display in green [...]