Creating a Free Blog with Blogger Presentation

Several weeks ago I created a really simple presentation illustrating the process of signing up for a new blog account with Blogger. It's an incredibly simple and basic presentation, but I run into enough people who aren't that savvy with computers or online applications, so I thought a really basic tutorial that walks these kinds of people through the process might be a useful resource to have available. At least when people ask me, "How hard is it to set up my own blog?" I now have somewhere to point them.

Creating a Free Blog with Blogger Presentation

Next up will be some follow-up online visual explanations on how to create a blog post, mark things up in it, add links, add photos, etc.

Intereactive Hurricane Tracker Visualization

Stamen Design just released their latest work, an interactive hurricane tracker for MSNBC, just in time for Gustav.



Great interactive visualization in my opinion. Hover your mouse over different parts of the track to get specific information about that part of the visualization. This visualization will no doubt go in my Visual Zen Gallery.

Visual Thinking & Ideas V3

More good feedback from people on this on the VizThink forum. Through discussion on that forum, I realized I'd blundered. The original graphic I did was just trying to show the difference between getting ideas out of people's head vs getting ideas into people's heads. In the Dan Roam lexicon, it was a "what" problem I was trying to show.

After getting feedback about the procedural nature of visual communication, the problem really became a "how" problem - best shown with a flow chart. Rather than realize that at the time, I just tried to adapt my original graphic, and to complicate it, I had mind maps, um... on my mind. So, I just provided a good example of using the wrong kind of graphic to communicate something. Doh! Oh well. Live and learn.

So, version 3 below is an attempt at more of a procedural "how" depiction. I suppose a true flow chart should conform to little boxes representing each process and arrows between the processes. But I've done so many typical flow charts in my former corporate life that I wanted to go with a more graphical depiction (plus I'm feeling lazy and want to recycle elements from the previous versions). I've also shown it as cyclical to try to show the iterative nature of it.

Visual Thinking and Ideas Part 2

After getting good comments from Tom and Tom and Christine, plus Ryan Coleman in the VizThink forum about the Visual Thinking and Ideas post, I thought I'd revise the graphic for it. Results below:

Back of the Napkin Digital Mind Map

After creating a hand sketched Back of the Napkin mind map awhile back, I wanted to create it in a digital format that I could easily refer to. Dan Roam recently made some of his tools downloadable on his website, so I decided to create a Flash-based mind map with links to Dan's PDFs. Click on the image below to see the result.

Visual Thinking and Ideas

It's pretty cool living with someone else who's also a visual thinker. Just had lunch with my wife and we were discussing visual thinking and VizThink '08, specifically some of the differences between the work of people like David Sibbet who do a lot of graphic facilitation, and information designers like Karl Gude who create infographics.



Both deal with visualizing ideas and concepts. The difference seems to be that graphic facilitation, graphic recording, sketching, etc. focus on getting ideas and concepts OUT of people heads and capturing them in a visually engaging way that facilitates better ideas and problem solving. In these disciplines, the group process of creating that visual is as important (and one might argue even more important) than the resulting graphic.

On the other hand, the goal of people creating infographics is to get ideas IN to peoples heads. In this process a designer creates a graphic that is then dispersed to a larger audience to aid in understanding an idea or a concept.

I think that understanding the purpose and the goals of the various visual thinking disciplines is important to help us appreciate the values of each.

Visual Thinking Blog Map

There's about a dozen visual thinking blogs/websites that I follow regularly. Most I subscribe to via RSS feed. Some don't have feeds though or they're broken so I thought I'd create a little "map" of these sites in Flash using the logos of each which would link to the site.

While I was at it, I thought I'd organize them by what visual thinking content they primarily focus on using a spectrum of focusing on visual communicating ideas and concepts on the far left to visualizing data and information on the far right. Those that are in the middle are broader in scope. Placement is purely subjective of course. It's skewed a bit heavy on the right. Until I had placed all these I hadn't realized just how biased my visual thinking surfing was. It's odd because I'm actually more interested in visually communicating ideas and concepts than I am information and data. But, it's been easier for me to find sites and blogs relating to information visualization than idea visualization. I'm hoping that VizThink will help raise awareness of idea and concept visualization and that more good sites will become available. And I think the publicity that Dan Roam's "Back of the Napkin" is getting may help along those lines too.

I know there are dozens, if not hundreds, of other web sites and blogs that fall within the visual thinking realm, but these are the small set that focus on. In the interest of rounding it out a bit, I added a more traditional text list below the map.