

Google search volume by language (WebGL) - pldpld
http://data-arts.appspot.com/globe-search

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_delirium
Hmm, I like this somewhat, but I'm not that sure it's an improvement from an
information perspective. It seems that the main win of a 3d version over a map
is that two axes of information can be displayed: color of the dot, and how
far it projects up from the surface. But I have trouble interpreting the
heights in any meaningful way; they seem mostly like noise, and in reality
what I'm looking at to get an idea of editing activity is the density of the
dots in various regions, not the height of the individual spikes--- exactly
what I'd do on the 2d version of the map.

It does strictly provide more information, because there are two kinds of
density displayed: how many spikes/dots are in a region, and how high each
individual one is. But this two-factor density visualization seems more
confusing than helpful; I think I'd rather have a single smoothed density
estimate. Then maybe that could be displayed as height in a more terrain-type
way?

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mjb
I really like this, not because it's an excellent quantitative presentation of
the data, but because the 3D makes it really easy to visualize distances and
scales.

Some interesting things to note: \- Amazingly, given the long history there,
Europe has very clean borders and language divisions. This is obviously clear
on the ground, too, but it's one of the things that continually surprises me
about history. Compare China, which started off in a similar place over a
relatively similar time scale.

\- English Africa seems to have much higher internet penetration than other
areas in Africa. Is this a colonial effect, or is it because African people
tend to use the internet in English?

\- There are some spikes here in unexpected places, like Reunion/Mauritius.
Turkey is also more active than I would expect, and India less so.

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its2010already
Interesting - around Idaho there is a orange spike. Wonder where and what
exactly that is.

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allochthon
I understand why there would be so much English search traffic in New York.
But what's going on with Florida?

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ScottWhigham
Doesn't show up for me in FF 3.6. Maybe you have to have Chrome.

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masklinn
Well it's a WebGL demo so you need WebGL support.

Webkit trunk and Firefox 4 both work (FF4 is extremely fast, in fact). Camino
(FF3) does not support WebGL apparently, and neither does Safari 5. Does not
work in Opera 11 either.

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notaspamcan
Anyone else getting an error about too many redirects?

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aquarin
Sadly some parts of the World are almost dark.

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zorked
Minor countries aside (like North Korea) the part of the map that looks really
really wrong is Africa.

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Uchikoma
Yes, including the minor country Germany.

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Uchikoma
Germany is blacked out.

