danielknox.net

After seeing Nick Mihailovski’s Google Analytics / Protovis mash-up last week, I couldn’t resist playing around with the Protovis visualization package over the weekend.

My first visualization effort is a treemap showing the popularity of sub-categories within DailyMe.com based on Newstogram data for October 2009 (built upon the Protovis treemap example).



The colors represent primary categories, while the size of each sub-category corresponds to its popularity as measured by the ‘Digital News Affinity’ (DNA) score for October 2009.

The search field at bottom of the treemap highlights certain categories / sub-categories (e.g. searching for “sports” highlights the 14 sports sub-categories).

Check out the working demo (requires a modern browser e.g. Firefox, Safari).

The title isn’t a metaphor for information overload or filter failure… the walls of my office are literally covered in print-outs or drawings of histograms, pie charts, bar charts, treemaps, mindmaps and various other types of data display.

As DailyMe gets access to more and more data through the Newstogram platform, I am becoming increasingly focused on data visualization and specifically how to make our data visually appealing, easy to understand and (most importantly) useful for our clients.

One of my tasks for next week is to check out the open-sourced Protovis SVG Visualization Library and learn how to make my own treemaps (inspired by the team at Google Analytics who just released the video below showing how to create treemap visualizations of data extracted through their APIs) - I foresee more print-outs getting pinned to the walls….

Next New Networks published some interesting data last week about viewership to their family of online video channels, which include Indy Mogul, Barely Digital (home of Obama Girl) and new addition Hungry Nation. The study, conducted with the help of web video measurement firm Visible Measures, showed that the peak period for video viewership was the six hours between 12pm ET to 3pm PT, when many North Americans are presumably looking for a short distraction from work.

[caption id=”attachment_32” align=”alignnone” width=”481” caption=”Source: Visible Measures via Silicon Alley Insider”][/caption]

This trend is hardly surprising given the type of content that Next New Networks specializes in…. short-form entertainment videos. I recall from my time at Channel 4 that short-form videos were popular during the day and long-form videos were popular during the evening (and I bet if you looked at data for Hulu you’d see a similar trend).

By contrast, the general trend for most online news sites is still a morning peak (for instance, DailyMe.com has a readership peak most days between 7am ET and 10am PT). However, I suspect this general trend masks differences between different types of content on online news sites, some of which may provide a similar lunchtime ‘outlet’ to the Next New Networks videos. Newstogram, our soon-to-launch analytics / intelligence platform, will provide an easy way for online news sites to drill down and find the popularity of different categories, topics, people etc. throughout the day in order to identify the types of content where Lunchtime is the new Primetime.

Recently launched site DailyPerfect seems interesting.

Site claims its “innovative personalization technology” is based on “automated semantic analysis”… which sounds a lot like messaging for DailyMe and our Newstogram technology.