I love the web

I love the web and its ability to feed my brain (whilst sucking up my free time). The problem of course is that there is so much cool stuff out there that you just don’t know about.

For instance, on Digg I came across a nice visualization showing the edits to the “Evolution” article on Wikipedia.

I was curious to see what the source of the visualization was but there was no credit on the image. Looking in the comments for the post I didn’t find anything about the source but I did find this link which shows the public acceptance of evolution in various countries around the world. It is interesting to see where the USA sits on the chart.

Mmm, looking at the URL for the original visualization I could see that the image was hosted on Amazon’s S3 service and contained a reference to twittypic. A quick Google search turned up this site twittypic.com which monitors Twitter looking for images and video that are referenced by tweets, in the assumption that things that are referenced to by lots of people would be of interest to others. Nice idea.

Sure enough on Twittypic I found this post which referenced the original picture which was hosted at _http://www.research.ibm.com/visual/images/discover_mag.jpg_ shortening the URL turned up the Visual Communication Lab at IBM. Clicking on their projects link turned up (amongst other interesting things) history flow which was the tool used to create the visualization.

Wow, so from a Digg post I :

Gained insight into the Evolution vs Creation “debate”
Found out how widely Evolution is accepted
Found a new site (twittypic) that I’ll be adding to me RSS feeds
Found some cool tools for visualizations from IBM (check out Many Eyes)
and added some more stuff to the web by writing this post

Love it…