Amazon Books Map

 Amazon Books Map



Amaznode (http://amaznode.fladdict.net/)
is a relation based search engine for amazon which is made with adobe flash9 (as3). This search engine visualizes a relation network of products in amazon, from the statistics data "customers who bought this item also bought", by digging related products again and again. Amaznode is not
only for searching but also good for researching and making an associate link.

Fantastic how it mines the associational network of products 'also purchased by...'

good display for hover over with its interactivity. love it.

integratable to your own amazon associates id. score

and not just books, or info vis... any product. the best amazon widget.


Affiliate with amaznode

Amaznode enables you to make a direct link to paticular saerch query, and you can also add your own amazon associate link.


In the search result view, click the "COPY RESULT LINK" button at the top left menu. It copies a handy html to your clipboard.


a href="http://amaznode.fladdict.net/#keywords=information%20design&locale=uk&searchIndex=" target="_blank" affiliate="AFFILIATEID-22">Search with amaznode: information design /a>


You can easly make a link to amaznode search result by adding this code to your blog or email.


Also if you have amazon associate id, and you replace the part "affiliate=" to your own id, all products in this query works as your associate product link.



Market analysis with amaznode


An another aspect of amaznode is that for researching tool. Searching with amaznode, you can find hidden characteristics of products. For example, some kind of products may be bought by a limited user group even it is very very popular.


Made by Takayuki Fukatsu (fladdict.net / blog)


see previous post: Green Search Engine

UK Brands 2007 Visualisation

3b46320d18886a4a653d03601e7b0f95 UK Brands 2007 Visualisation


Top 10 UK Brands 2007 Visualisation
Originally uploaded by visual think map
This was to visualise the top brands spatially and who owns them/other brands they own also. I started off with well known brand portfolios to visualise them like colgate palmolive but had no direction. So found this top ten list for 2007, and worked from here.

http://www.wonderlandblog.com/wonderland/2007/01/top_ten_most_po.htmle

I liked the vector curved lines like with Maeda's Key magazine covrer post. kept to a soft blue, red pastel palette so you can really visualise the brands and their order, arrangment, ownership.

Was inspired by a car badges brands visual:

coolinfographics.blogspot.com/2008/04/who-owns-car-compan...

featured here: visualthinkmap.ning.com/photo/photo/show?id=2168552%3APho...

Visual Communication: Wordless Recipics

laurenbugeja+ +visual+recipe1 Visual Communication: Wordless Recipics

http://www.coo.kz/

This is the website Lauren Bugeja has created to house these beautiful visual maps. The visual equivalent of a thesis - work from her final semester in Visual Communications.

She calls these visual maps Recipics, good use of ambiguity in the word pun on recipes. These are great explorations of visually mapping information making it universally accessible. She still uses the paradigm of numbers & arrows, but what I like best is how she uses these & space to depict time & measurements fig. Depicting time in a similar tecnhique to Bradford Paley in Once more around the sun. She uses faded flames contrasted to full colour to depict gas mark, which is admirable technique removing the use of numbers.

She has great experiments between mimetic depictions of food, but creates great iconic characters to represent meats i.e. lamb=sheep, beef=cow & pork=pig, fig.

Bugeja acknowledges the occasional stumbling block: “The ingredients are still a work in progress,” she said. “For example, it’s hard to explain the difference between flour, baking powder, anthrax and cocaine without words.”

A clean sans serif font, & beautiful pastel colours really caps off a great, excellantly executed idea.

Her research map as she calls it, looks at the contrast of word & images, human factors with Human Information Processing with communication. In relation to interaction of the GUI (graphic user interface) she states the same as I have researched with engagement allowing greater playfulness through more challenge, presenter control, and variety in a game for browsing.

What’s most relevant here is the Information Architecture to ‘organise information to create meaning’ through ‘scheme & structure’ i.e. mental schemas and these visual map techniques of brainstorms, spider diagrams etc (Bugeja, 2008, p VC Major project). There are many more beautiful visual maps of all topics linked under diagram diaries on flickr.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/laurenbugeja/sets/72157594238802216/


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/style/tmagazine/06tdiagram.html?pagewanted=print

New York Times Key Magazine Cover

ny+times+key+magazine2+ +john+maeda+ +CR+nov+07+p42 New York Times Key Magazine Cover


Note that I dont have an obsession with New York at the moment, but with such great art foundations of Rauschenberg, DeKooning & Pollock its no surprise of its creative vein. Today technology is the key that has fused creativity & opened boundaries to allow interdisciplinary practice.

The New York Times real estate magazine Key started with the cover design concept of hiring people that are brilliant to do personal interpretations of what a key means to them & their lives. The 1st cover in the Fall 2006 by Carin Goldberg featured all the places she lived at using the font Dynamoe (green & black thumbnail) & spring 2007 (yellow & purple thumbnail) was designed by new york design studio 2x4.

In dialogue with John Maeda (author of Creative Code: Aesthetics + Computation) art director Dick Barnett looked at some of Maeda's sketches and replied to him saying how he's 'loving #3 Google Mappish Mondrian' (3rd thumbnail along) idea and how he might 'think of a way to make it more personal to [maeda's] life'. Maeda responded utilising Boston, he states how he 'thinks of the world as a sort of map of cities', a topographic territory, he 'mined the internet for all the cities with an airport' & made a simple diagram and then drew some 'fluid like curves [framing] to connect into the centre of the keyhole' (4th thumbnail), (Centaur Publication, 2007, p. nov – 42).

Maeda wanted to concentrate on the background rather than the foreground & after some design processing (problem solving) such as replacing fonts used to that of Key magazines T-Star, it was finished. The design is brilliant, although probably not that easy a task to create without access/stroke knowledge of computer science functionality but excellant aesthetics. The overall white stands out from the blue (a colour normally percieved as depiciting sea in maps) causing a slight incongruity on part of the viewer, map reader/user. Boston being the epicentre of travel in this map providing the key access to other cities and the viral red linking lines spidering the topgraphic locations.

Excellant Map utilising technology to visualise data functionality mentioned upon with Bradford Paley, in the heart of its design.

'John Maeda is an artist and a computer scientist, and he views the computer not as a substitute for brush and paint but as an artistic medium in its own right. His mission is to foster the growth of what he calls 'humanist technologists'- people that are capable of articulating future culture through informed understanding of the technologies they use' (http://www.designboom.com/eng/interview/maeda.html, 2008, p. john maeda interview).

More examples of the stages of Maeda's Key Cover design here, http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/09/06/realestate/keymagazine/20070909_KEY_COV_SS_index.html

Creative Review. New York. Centaur Publication, 2007, p. nov – 42).