Gamification and The New York Times

Share

There's a lot of buzz in social networks about the little game The New York Times has used to illustrate their feature Just One More Game... Actually, what they publish is a version of the Kick Ass game by Rootof Creations, as indicated in the source. Usually, these ideas look absolutely mad when proposed in other newsrooms. Then, The New York Times or any other respected newspapers uses it and all those who banned the idea in their media clap like crazy. Maybe that's why NYT is so innovative. They don't mind how important they are, they are open to new ideas and don't think a game or an animated GIF (as published today on its frontpage) is not as serious as  they should be.

But is not the first time The New York Times uses a game to explain something. And, in my opinion, not, by far, the best. In fact, this is just some amusement, meanwhile other times NYT has used those games as a really effective way to explain some concepts.

My favorite is the Rock-Paper-Scissors game to understand how robots think. Smart and completely amazing.

It's not a game just for the sake of having a game in the page (as the one on the top of the article). It's actually an explanation in disguise. And a really good one.

The same they did when they wanted you to know why is dangerous to text and drive. Other incredible piece called Gauging your Distraction.

Better than a text and giving you the reasons, they give the experience. The classical Show Don't Tell! as its best.
This particular piece made me think much about it, and from them I always try to look for the possibility of using games to explain information. Sometimes just slightly, sometimes on a more evident way.

Games are not just about making things funny. Means better understanding of the information. Reader engagement. Success in social networks. Scarce content. Time spent by the user/reader. Many many reasons for, at least, try to think on the possibility.

Visual.ly finally released

Tweet Share

There was something that many of us were expecting from a long time, the final release of Visual.ly, a web which tries to be the big showcase of infographics and visualizations.  And it has been finally inaugurated.
Anyway, many of us (me included), feared that it can become a bunch of infoposters or tower-graphics.

At first sight,  I see just a few things that I really like, with many decorated texts on an hypervertical format.

Google and the writer who wants 'something beautiful and funny for the page'

Tweet Share

Google has announced a taxes infographic contest with a 5,000$ award at DataViz Challenge. Until here, everything's allright. Now, the problems.

The post title on Google's blog
Can you make tax data exciting?
Yes, Google is not asking for something intersting, comprehensible, clear, divulgative...no. Google's asking for something 'exciting'. As those writers who come to the infographics departments asking for something 'beautiful' or 'funny' because the 'page is boring. But now it's not that writer. It's Google asking.

Just for United States
In this time of globalization, where Google is one of the starring, it's precissely Google who creates a contest just for people 'physically in United States'. ???

Alberto Cairo vs. Google
As an example of what they expect Google show a bubble graphic. If Alberto Cairo finds it, Google should be afraid.

Via @rpicallo and Infosthetics

How NOT to use an infographic

Tweet Share

Quick answer: as decoration. And of course never as a false trick to attract readers.

I'll just tell you something that happened to me today. I open the homepage of El País. Surprise! An image selling a graphic. Nice news, lately is not usual to see infographics at elpais.com.

Click on the article. The image is a blog about ecology, inside El País.

Ok, I need one more click to get into the post. I hope I can see the graphic in good resolution now. It's about why men contaminate more than women. Look interesting. I want to see the data.

Oops. The graphic is just a thumbnail, I have to click to see it bigger. I don't think that's a good idea, but I click.

Oh my god The graphic can't be zoomed! And it's in french! Anyway, you can't read the data. It's used just as a 'beautiful illustration'.... It promises information, but does ot give yu any data.

MI read the post, looking for an explanation. No reference to the data that should be displayed oin the graphic... Oh! yes. A reference. A link to other web. The blogger shows that he is not really interested in the graphic: "See illustration at the beginning of the post" writes. I'm getting mad...

Well, I click on the link, at least I hope I can see the data somewhere. The same size. I know now where the find the graphic... Anyway, I try to get into the article to see the data. But no. It's just for suscribers.

So, my idea is: the blogger doen't know what does the graphic show. Whic are the data. He just liked the image and took it. The frontpage editor also liked the image. He used it for the frontpage, no matter what it says.

I may say this is not usual at El País That's maybe the first time I see something like this on its web. I clciked three times, see for pages on its web. And now I'm mad at El País. Doesn't seem like a good idea...

Every city, every block

I don't have much more to say than absolutely amazing. This project of The New York Times with United States census is one of the most impressive things I've seen lately. An infographic, a visualization?Words are not enough. Is useful, complete, contains stories... Nothing better than taking a look.

- Share

Barcelona-Real Madrid: stats for the day before

Tomorrow monday is one of the most importants day for spanish sports-fans: the two main soccer-football teams Barcelona and Real Madrid have one of their two annual confrontations. Some years ago, this was the big chance for infographics depatments to publish a big infographics with the line-ups, big photos or illustrations with the starts, some details of the tactics... Nowadays, data is the big deal here. We have so much information that we try to find the hidden keys, numeric details that can decide the match o rjust little curiosities for the supporters.
This year there's also a big difference: this match is always played on saturday or sunday, but this year will be on monday, so we have all the weekend to fill up the sport pages with information about something that has not happened yet. So stats are something great to offer in pills during the weekend.

Som examples. It may not be very polite, but I'll start with what I've done for lainformacion.com:

- An infographic with stats for all the players of both teams, where the reader can choose which kind of data can be visualized.
- Some posts on the data & visualization blog A Base de Datos:
         - Cristiano Ronaldo is the half of Messi
         - Cristiano is the one who suffer more fouls, Xavi is the one who deserves them the less
         - Real Madrid steals more balls, Barcelona looses less

Público. One of the newspapers where infographics seize all the possibilities of data. A pair of example by Artur Galocha:

The two cents of the main spanish sports newspapers, Marca:

The first one, this comparison between the two biggests stars: Messi and Ronaldo.
The second one, a comparison of all the players of the match, and them with the rest of the league:

Sport, the sports catalan newspapers, also publish the match by the numbers, but rather tables than infographic:

The other catalan sports newspaper, El Mundo Deportivo, publish this piece:

And just one more detail: a design detail on the web of the generalist Barcelona newspaper El Periódico:

These are just some examples, if you know any other, just send it to me and I'll publish it.

UPDATE
One more example, an infographic by Jorge Galofre for El Universal (Venezuela).  Thanks to Nicolás for sending it.

And another one: Konstantinos Antonopoulos for the greek sports newspaper Exedra

A year of new narratives at lainformacion.com

This september we will celebrate the first official birthday of lainformacion.com. I say official because we started April 23, 2009 as a beta version. In this time, the New Narratives department has published around 400 infographics (or how you prefer to call those things). This is just a little selection we've made.

Share

How Big Really...

Wonderful tool to compare real sizes with Google Maps created by BBC with the name Dimensions. A huge amount of templates such as the Gulf oil spill, the pyramids, Armstrong's moonwalk, the moon or the Glastonbury festival... Go and take a look!
Share

Murdoch's strategy for making people pay for The Times online: Infographics

The webs of The Times have already lifted the paywall. But if you want people to pay you got to give them something attractive, diffferent. Unique. And The Times thinks that infographics can be that added value.

They have hired one of the spanish stars of online infographics recently, Rafa Höhr. Former graphics editor of Prisacom (ELPAIS.com, As.com...) and who was working in the online media of Grupo Joly (a regional spanish media group).

Now they're also publishing interactive infographics for its iPad edition, as I could discover thanks to Esther Vargas.

The Times iPad infographic - “Health Profile of England” from Applied Works on Vimeo.

Infographics people are telling that time ago. We are not just cared about our jobs. Infographics can be the added value. The difference among the flood of webs. Murdoch thinks infographics are a good reason to make people pay. He can success or fail. But he's not just another person telling the same old story.


Share

Live matches of the World Cup at NYT or why they're the bests

Take a look to how NYT is covering live the matches of the World Cup. As an example, the Argentina-Nigeria played yesterday...


They don't have anything that others don't have.
Touches per player, you cand find it on some sports media.
Passes by players. I do it myself at lainformacion.com.
Minute-by-minute comments. I've seen it everywhere.
Shots located. Nothing new.
Heatmaps. Not so usual, but not new.

But they have all of them.
Visually.
Live.
Updated minute by minute.
Very easy to understand, easy to play with.
That's why they are the best.
And all that in a country where soccer/football is not so important...


Share

Is The New York Times an innovative newspaper?

Just click on the image and take a look to the showcase...

Old masterworks, modern graphics

The Thyssen Museum of Madrid shares on its web an infographic to navigate through time and artworks of its collection. And when I say share, I mean they give you a code to include it on your own web. Your product could be old and classic, but you can sell it on the most modern ways

MotionGraphics

This is what Zack Wise is preparing for nytimes.com...

NYTimes After Effects Demo Reel 2009 from Zach Wise on Vimeo.

Looks great. Via @drewvigal

Visualizing crowdsourcing: Trendsmap

We all know nytimes.com is an innovative newsroom. A good example of that is this Twitter map of the Superbowl.




The location of the tweets during the match showed very interesting. And now, these kind of solutions with Twitter can be found on Trendmaps, a trendtopics visualizator for this microblogging service.

This is an example on the visual power of the crowdsourcing data. Visualization has become a powerful way to understand trends and what's happening on thsi interconnected world. So you know what you have to do: tell your children to become infographic experts: there's a future for them! :)

Three reasons journalists shouldn't use Flash

Great article in 10000 words. For online visual journalists, Flash is the one, big, necessary tool. There are many others, but Flash is the king. But sometimes Flash is not the right tool. The three reasons are better explained on the complete post, but here you are the headlines (comments are mine):

1. Flash projects take a long time to create
There are many ways to create graphics, so think twice before starting a Flash prohject that could be explained perfectly as a text or as a video... But, you really need to do it not just with Flash, do it also with print graphics.

2. Many projects don't need to be animated
That's true, many time it looks like we don't know that online graphic can be static. An image. If it doesn't need to be animated, don't do it. If you don't use it properly, animation is sometimes more a disturb than a help. Maybe sometimes we just don't need a Flash.

3. Most journalists are not designers
Want a professional product? Be professional. It not just the tool. You have to think visually. Let visual journalists work on visual news. It's not just the 'how to', is also the 'why'.

And I must thank the 10000words people. They give three examples on when flash infographics works: one about blue whales on National Geographic, other about construction deaths in Las Vegas and another about how a classic orchrestra works, done by Carlos Gámez at lainformacion.com, the web where I work as New Narratives Director.

lainformacion.com, second month

My new media, lainformacion.com is two-months old this tuesday 23th. Although I published here asome examples of the first works, now here you are some examples to criticise... You can watch them clicking on the image

Who's who on Lost (this one in english)
As Matthew Fox/Jack was spending some days in Spain, we seized the oportunity to make this graphic with the relationships of the series. Great opportunity to mix work and fun!



Merging tv channels
There was a new law that allowed tv channels to merge and there were a lort of rumors about that. So we made a graphic showing how would work the different possibilities on different fields



Inmigration Explorer in Spain
The same day we decided we will do this graphic, nytimes.com published one with the same idea. What I used was the word 'Explorer', I loved it.



Looking for the black box of the AF447
Another coincidence. When Carlos showed me the sketches of the graphic he was starting, we couldn't imagine that El País will publish hours later (and before than us) a look-alike to what was our graphic (it grew from then).



Hidden Matisse
The Thyssen Museum of Madrid inagurated an exhibition with Matisse works, so we decided to make a graphic container fpr the video and Gigapans.



Hiring player at the soccer league
We had a blog aboutthe soccer summer market, so we summarized (and we keep updating daily) all the operations of the Liga.




Interactive guide of instruments of a Phylarmonic orchestra
Adding to a collection of songs we like at lainformacion.com, we celebrated the European Day of Music with this visual encyclopedia by Carlos Gámez

Crime maps: hyperlocal and global

Infographics are, in the best cases, very useful. One of the uses that is succeding at this moment is the crime map.

The last one has been nytimes.com, with this graphic about homicides at The Big Apple. Very The Grey Lady style: clean and with a lot of options to choose how to visualize it.




But the first time I saw one was at chicagocrime.org, today inside of the hyperlocal news site everyblock.org. You can take a glance at the Chicago map here



But many times you don't need to cross the Atlantic Ocean to find examples. One of my hometown newspapers, La Voz de Cádiz, has its own criminal map



But there's also the global scale: Wikicrimes.org, a brazilian initiative for the whole world. This is not very popular yet, but it has the potential to become very useful



Because good and useful ideas have no frontiers

Why I haven't updated the blog lately

I'm sorry because I haven't udated the blog as much as I would like lately. These have been the firsts weeks of lainformacion.com (it was released April 23rd) and the launching has teken most of my time. Ans these are my firsts steps online... So I'm going to seize this oportunity to share my firsts works with you, so you can critiquize them with you fiercests words, that0s teh best way to learn... You can access all the graphics done at graficos.lainformacion.com. Or access the RSS here.
Here you are some examples. Click on images to see the graphics.


The newsroom's library
As our first day was the day of the book, we shared with the audiencia our most loved books...



EPA results
The EPA publish the number of unemployed people in Spain, now more than 4 million people. It was our first breaking-news graphic... With the launching we have nothing prepared. So I prepared something the day before, so when the data were released the morning after, we just had to update the new data...



Cleaning the highest building of Spain
Just another way for offering a photogallery...



The way Madrid sounds
UA collaboration with our great video team for the day against the noise.



A map of the Spanish saving banks
Situation of the spanish saving banks, by size and reliability.



So I wait your for your critiques of these graphics or any of all the graphics done at the graphics page.

Good and bad things about collaborative maps

Google Maps is a great tool, very easy to use. A perfect example of a 2.0 tool, where the user can be also a content creator. That's good. But it has problems, also.

It happened with the swineflu world map. Any citizen of the world could add cases at the beginning. Anyone who saw his neighbour coughin ran to place a pin. Alarming, and not helping as an informative map. Many placed suspicios cases, not so many erased them when they were discarded. In a few days the map was a mees. Now, most of the things are fixed. But it is no more a proper collaborative map. I tried to fix things and it was impossible.


View 2009 H1N1 Flu Outbreak Map in a larger map


But sometimes, having a helping hand from the readers is something wonderful. More if we have someone as filter. A media, as an example. That was what La Voz de Galicia (spain) did with this illegal landfills.



The map absolutely open has more problems. A good example is the infographic journalist map you have on the upper right corner of this blog. Is empty. It has data creted by me and yourselves... but someone entered once ... and erased all the content. I don't think that he/she meant it, but it happened...

I really think that the participation of the readers/users is a great help. Really important for media that want to connect with their audiences. But we are prfoessionals, and we have to offer professional content. We have to check that all the information given by the citizens is true, rigorous.
I say Yes to citizen journalism. Yes to collaboration. But I say No to wait for others to do what we should do.

Bye Bye Portfolio... :(

Condé Nast edits magazines as Vogue, GQ, Wired, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker... But many of us had the name on our heads thanks to Condé Nast Traveler, where John Grimwade has done an incredible work as infographics director for so many years. John was also working on the launching of other magazine of the group, Portfolio, which is closing now.

This is, obviously no good news. Not just because of the people fired, I really liked the style of the online graphics (I didn't have the opportunity of taking a look to any print issue). They were easy to read, clear, with a good use of the visual impact...

This is not the first time I show this graphic on this blog...



And I've always loved the weekly Quiz...



Not eeverything was, in my opinion, high quality. There were some graphics that dind't have the 'class' that this magazine derserved. But there were not many...



I hope they don't quit the web, so I can still take an occasional glance to its great multimedia section.