February 13th, 2012 @ // No Comments
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Google blacked out its logo earlier this week to protest two bills currently making their way through Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). They’re not alone; many websites went completely black, displaying statements as to why they oppose these bills and often linking to other sites for more information. But the battle’s not over yet.
The ostensible goal of these bills is to prevent “rogue, foreign websites” from infringing on copyrights in the US, and to punish those who break intellectual property laws by downloading pirated content. SOPA and PIPA are supported by the movie and music industries here in the US – specifically, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). These organizations are widely known for overreaching to protect their intellectual property, filing excessive lawsuits aimed at illegal downloaders but often catching innocent people. Does anyone truly expect these heavyweights NOT to act abusively if either of these bills becomes law?
The bills themselves were improperly drafted by lawmakers and lobbyists with no real understanding of the Internet. Reddit offers up an excellent explanation of some of these issues in both SOPA and PIPA. They start with the bills’ definition of what constitutes a “foreign” website. The bills give a definition for a “domestic Internet site.” Such a site is one that has a domestic domain name or IP address – and that is defined as a domain registered or assigned by a registrar or other authority located in the US. Foreign sites are simply sites that are not domestic.
Right away there’s a problem. All sites with .com, .net, and .org addresses would be considered “domestic” – even if the site is hosted on servers that are not located in the US. That means wikileaks.org and thepiratebay.org would be considered “domestic,” even though they’re not hosted in the US. Conversely, sites like Redd.it and bit.ly would be considered foreign, even though they’re hosted on servers in the US!
That’s just the beginning of the definition-related issues with these two bills, but for now I’ll spare you the details. Among other things, the bills allow the office of the Attorney General to take action against a “foreign” infringing site (this is why the definition is so important) under certain circumstances. The site has to be directed to a US audience, and has to be used as a means for engaging in, enabling, or facilitating the activities of copyright infringement. The problem is, “facilitating the activities” can be read pretty broadly. Arguably, a site that explains how other sites abuse intellectual property could be painted with this brush.
So what actions can the Attorney General take if one of these bills were passed? There’s a long list, which amounts to requiring US search engines and sites to remove all links to the site, forcing US advertising services to no longer serve ads on the sites, preventing US payment companies (like PayPal) from doing business with such sites, and something called DNS blacklisting. Harold Feld explains why this is not just a bad idea, but a major security risk.
Oh, and remember how misguided the bills’ definition of “foreign” website was? Their definitions of search engines are equally broad, such that many sites with user-generated content (like Reddit) would qualify as search engines.
More Search Engine News Articles
More By Terri Wells
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Article source: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-News/SOPA-and-PIPA-Bad-Ideas/
February 13th, 2012 @ // No Comments
(Page 1 of 2 )
Personalized search makes it much tougher to know your site’s exact standings in the SERPs. But you can use some of the recent changes to Google’s features to help your pages turn up high in the results, and attract the traffic you’re looking for.
In articles here on SEO Chat and on my blog, I talk much more about getting traffic than I do about actually getting top search rankings. In fact, in my “State of Marketing Address” I discuss at some length how the focus in 2012 is going to have to change.
There is a simple reason for that: search results are now extremely variable from one person to another, especially on Google, and this has been the case for quite some time. The new “Search Plus Your World” results on Google make this situation far worse.
In fact, I can make almost anyone’s website show up on page 1 for a given search result on their computer — at same time that on mine, their site might be buried on page 10, if it shows up anywhere in the results at all.
However, now that I’ve just said that, let me also say that you can dramatically improve your chances for ranking well no matter who does a search for a relevant phrase (or where they do it). Yes, while it is true that, with the highly variable nature of Google search results, you have no idea where you will show up, you can certainly “stack the odds in your favor” that you’ll show up quite high in the search results.
What’s interesting with all of this is that the new “search plus your world” feature, at least for the moment, makes getting your site ranking well for everyone easier than ever. Google is showing that lots of “+1s” will rank well, and those are fairly easy to get. Take a look around the articles here on SEO Chat, and you’ll quickly see that Google seems to be giving preferential treatment to Google Plus pages (especially if they are named the same as a search phrase).
In fact, it is rapidly looking like those have more weight with Google than even links. This means that businesses are likely to start working hard to get them. Furthermore, local businesses will be well served by doing everything they can to make sure they are added to as many circles as possible.
These connections look as if they will heavily drive the results listings for ALL users. The more +1s and the more connections a given business, page, etc. has, the better its rankings are likely to be.
What’s interesting is that if you go to fiverr.com, it’s pretty easy to find people that will get you hundreds of +1s. Now you need to be smart about this. Getting hundreds of +1s to a page that doesn’t even have that much traffic is going to raise red flags and probably won’t help much.
That said, imagine for a moment combining the idea of getting a bunch of +1s with a Google page. This is proving to be a rather rapid mechanism for getting on the first page (or even on the ever important first three results) in a startlingly short period of time.
The best part is that these rankings appear to hold even for people without Google Plus accounts, which is a testament to how strongly social factors are being weighted in the newest Google search algorithm.
More Google Optimization Articles
More By Matt Goffrey
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Article source: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Optimization-Help/The-Google-Search-Optimization-Truth-You-Arent-Being-Told/
February 13th, 2012 @ // No Comments
When I began to practice SEO 8 years ago, I never would have guessed that I’d be writing a post about data visualization. Perhaps I might have foreseen myself writing about web analytics or information architecture, but data visualization seemed like something for the statistics fans. But today in web marketing, the emphasis on content has never been stronger, and it just so happens that one eminently shareable form of content is the data visualization. And I’ve come to love the crap out of data viz.
Another person that loves the crap out of data viz is Edward Tufte. ‘ET’, as he’s sometimes referred, has been preaching the merits of quality data visualization since before the world wide web existed, let alone SEO. He has authored 4 books on the topic, is a professor of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale University, and actually serves on Barack Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act panel in order to provide transparency in the use of recovery funds. I was fortunate enough to catch him when he was in Seattle during his traveling seminar tour. I learned a lot that day, and have since learned quite a bit more through reading his and others’ writing on the topic.
David McCandless’s Information Is Beautiful Blog is a must-bookmark, and his TED talk below is a great data viz primer.
Alright, enough with the intro. Let me quickly lay out what I hope this post will accomplish for the SEOmoz reader.
So far I’ve yet to say it, but there’s an elephant in the room. Infographics. The buzz around the word has reached a fever pitch. Yes, infographics are a form of data visualization, but there are so many ways that infographics are being abused that the backlash seems to be rightfully mounting. Are all infographics bad? Of course not. Just the bad ones.
As I stated earlier, and as you’ve probably seen, data visualization is a super-effective and shareable form of content creation. Now stay with me here: In this post I’m going to detail some of the principles of great data visualization as per Tufte’s teachings, with examples that fit the bill. As of the writing of this sentence, I’ve yet to pull link metrics for any of the examples I’ve got planned. By the end of this post, I’m hoping to prove to you (and myself, really) that Tufte’s principles aren’t just highfalutin, hoity-toity, stats nerd stuff, but a checklist for highly effective data visualization link building.
These principles to which I’m referring are discussed in the first chapter of Tufte’s Visual Display of Qualitative Information
Well, yeah. There have certainly been successful “infographics” that don’t actually display any real data, but that’s not really a piece of data visualization, is it? The Trustworthiness of Beards by Matt McInerney comes to mind. Regardless, it’s funny as hell and was viewed by everyone and their mom.
No matter what the rest of this post says about data visualizations for attracting links, the bottom line is that if you’ve got a good idea that would be best be shared in graphic form, roll with it. Because this graphic was originally hosted on imgur.com, the link metrics behind it are a bit fragmented. The .jpg file itself has over 200 linking root domains in OSE, and according to the designer it was, “Viewed over 1,000,000 times and featured #1 on the reddit homepage, LaughingSquid, FHM, and the LATimes”.
Tufte’s full thought on this:
Induce the viewer to think about the substance rather than about methodology, graphic design, the tech of graphic production, or something else.
Tufte wrote this originally in 1983, and while the spirit still holds, I think it should be revised for today’s times, especially framed in the context of link building: Our data visualization should provoke thought AND influence the reader to share.
Data visualizations built around economic and social matters are surefire ways to get your audience thinking and also have an inherent shareability (a product of the times and the human condition, I suppose). David McCandless’s The Billion Dollar Gram is a visualization that provides context to the incomprehensibly large monetary figures we hear in the media.
Despite not offering an embed code or dead-simple social sharing buttons, this visualization was a success: 2,801 tweets, 4,677 Facebook Shares and Likes, and 298 linking root domains.
Regarding the focus on substance rather than methodology, Tufte explains that the map makes a fantastic visualization medium because we’ve no reason to question methodology. A map is recognizable, allows us to put a lot of data in a small space, and displaying the data within allows us to easily understand and compare as needed. We’ll see a map before this post is done.
It should go without saying that a great piece of data visualization should tell the story honestly. Pie graphs, and especially exploded 3D pie charts, are the favorite whipping boy of data viz geeks, often because of their distortion and lack of clarity (“chart-junk”).
Bad 3D Exploding Pie Chart
I can’t believe I’m putting this in a blog post, but ‘with great power, comes great responsibility’. Yikes, quick shower, hold on.
But, it is true. If you’ve got great data, do it justice by presenting it honestly.
NPR did a visualization about the makeup of the US military that took a ton of interesting data, and represented it in a variety of formats.
Did it work? Well, it didn’t exactly kill it according to OSE (12 linking root domains, handful of tweets, and 700+ Facebook shares/likes), but I don’t suspect a news organization like NPR makes much of a link building outreach effort.
Charles Joseph Minard was a French civil engineer that created what Tufte calls, “The greatest statistical graphic ever drawn”: A map of the Napoleon’s Grande Armée’s advance and retreat into Russia.
The graphic impressively manages to depict 6 different sets of data: latitude, longitude, direction of movement, time, temperature, and size of the army.
Obviously, because this is a graphic made in the 1800s, looking up link metrics would be a bit silly.
Distilling down a big chunk of data is not easy, and the onus often falls on the designer. Tufte laments that the “lack of quantitative skills of professional artists” is what makes designing a great data visualization difficult. The best designed visualizations exist as a symbiosis between smart quantification and beautiful and elegant design.
David McCandless and Lee Byron made a graphic of Facebook post-break-up status messages by the time of year. Over 10,000 status updates in this pretty little graph:
Some fun data, for sure, and people loved it. Open Site Explorer shows 92 linking root domains, 3,000+ Facebook shares/likes, and nearly 1,000 tweets.
Though not necessary, interactivity makes comparing data in a visualization particularly fun and engaging. Sometimes the best use of a dataset is to present the viewer with the controls, letting them uncover things on their own.
I had a lot of fun playing around with Hotspots’ interactive display of Twitter buzz for this year’s Superbowl ads. It’s too new for link metrics, but I’m honestly surprised at the lack of social mentions: Only 29 shares/likes and 96 tweets?
Many ambitious datasets call for a visualization that gracefully handles the large, 30,000 foot figures way down to the super granular, all while maintaining the proper spatial relations. This allows the viewer to explore the data; he or she understands the big figures quickly, but has the opportunity to pick out some of the more minute details.
This infographic by the Technology Review details the space launches by country. It’s a two horse race between the US and the USSR/Russia, but it’s pretty fun to see how other countries have done space launches as well.
Its links were split between the PDF infographic and the post announcing the infographic. All told, it’s still one of the least linked-to (roughly 30 LRD) and socially mentioned visualizations (~300 likes/shares, 29 tweets) in this post, but as with the NPR visualization, there likely wasn’t much link building outreach done.
What’s the hook? After brainstorming ideas for clients at Distilled, this is how we narrow down our options. If you’re not telling a story to an audience that will care, you’re destined for a piece of linkbait that’ll fall flat. I could expend the effort to visualize, say, the number of fast food restaurants in Bergenfield, New Jersey (my home town – I cried when Roy Rogers was closed) over time, but who would really care?
We put together an interactive visualization for Food Service Warehouse that compared the average calories consumed per day with the percent of income spent on food broken down by country.
The result was a successful infographic (still a bit new for link metrics, but 26 LRD including newyorker.com, one.org and heifer.org, to go with 2,000+ likes/shares, and 1,200+ tweets) that highlighted the food consumption and economic disparity throughout the world.
While your data visualization should be able to speak for itself, every release should include a link off to the raw data, and some explanation of the how and why. Your writeup provides you with an opportunity to explain why your findings are important, as well as highlight other interesting findings. Sometimes your visualization warrants further explanation, but doesn’t fit within the graphic itself.
Thomson Travel’s How Music Travels – The History of Western Dance Music was a one-page interactive graphic, with further explanation and sources in the announcement blog post.
This data visualization was arguably the most successful of the ones in this post, with almost 250 LRD, 24,000+ shares/likes, and 5,000+ tweets.
So if you follow each of these principles will you definitely succeed in getting links for your data visualization? Of course not.
It’s important to remember that the data visualization is still just a medium for presenting (hopefully) interesting content, in the same way that the a blog might be home for a link bait blog post. Sure it helps to have a beautiful visualization or a crazy-awesome design for your blog, but it’s still just a frame around what matters most.
Still, in the same way that your blog should follow some best practices for allowing maximum exposure like proper keyword research, social buttons, comments, etc., I’m hoping some of Edward Tufte’s principles help improve the quality of your next great data visualization.
Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/cSdGLmeZpKI/data-visualization-principles-lessons-from-tufte
February 13th, 2012 @ // No Comments
When I began to practice SEO 8 years ago, I never would have guessed that I’d be writing a post about data visualization. Perhaps I might have foreseen myself writing about web analytics or information architecture, but data visualization seemed like something for the statistics fans. But today in web marketing, the emphasis on content has never been stronger, and it just so happens that one eminently shareable form of content is the data visualization. And I’ve come to love the crap out of data viz.
Another person that loves the crap out of data viz is Edward Tufte. ‘ET’, as he’s sometimes referred, has been preaching the merits of quality data visualization since before the world wide web existed, let alone SEO. He has authored 4 books on the topic, is a professor of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale University, and actually serves on Barack Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act panel in order to provide transparency in the use of recovery funds. I was fortunate enough to catch him when he was in Seattle during his traveling seminar tour. I learned a lot that day, and have since learned quite a bit more through reading his and others’ writing on the topic.
David McCandless’s Information Is Beautiful Blog is a must-bookmark, and his TED talk below is a great data viz primer.
Alright, enough with the intro. Let me quickly lay out what I hope this post will accomplish for the SEOmoz reader.
So far I’ve yet to say it, but there’s an elephant in the room. Infographics. The buzz around the word has reached a fever pitch. Yes, infographics are a form of data visualization, but there are so many ways that infographics are being abused that the backlash seems to be rightfully mounting. Are all infographics bad? Of course not. Just the bad ones.
As I stated earlier, and as you’ve probably seen, data visualization is a super-effective and shareable form of content creation. Now stay with me here: In this post I’m going to detail some of the principles of great data visualization as per Tufte’s teachings, with examples that fit the bill. As of the writing of this sentence, I’ve yet to pull link metrics for any of the examples I’ve got planned. By the end of this post, I’m hoping to prove to you (and myself, really) that Tufte’s principles aren’t just highfalutin, hoity-toity, stats nerd stuff, but a checklist for highly effective data visualization link building.
These principles to which I’m referring are discussed in the first chapter of Tufte’s Visual Display of Qualitative Information
Well, yeah. There have certainly been successful “infographics” that don’t actually display any real data, but that’s not really a piece of data visualization, is it? The Trustworthiness of Beards by Matt McInerney comes to mind. Regardless, it’s funny as hell and was viewed by everyone and their mom.
No matter what the rest of this post says about data visualizations for attracting links, the bottom line is that if you’ve got a good idea that would be best be shared in graphic form, roll with it. Because this graphic was originally hosted on imgur.com, the link metrics behind it are a bit fragmented. The .jpg file itself has over 200 linking root domains in OSE, and according to the designer it was, “Viewed over 1,000,000 times and featured #1 on the reddit homepage, LaughingSquid, FHM, and the LATimes”.
Tufte’s full thought on this:
Induce the viewer to think about the substance rather than about methodology, graphic design, the tech of graphic production, or something else.
Tufte wrote this originally in 1983, and while the spirit still holds, I think it should be revised for today’s times, especially framed in the context of link building: Our data visualization should provoke thought AND influence the reader to share.
Data visualizations built around economic and social matters are surefire ways to get your audience thinking and also have an inherent shareability (a product of the times and the human condition, I suppose). David McCandless’s The Billion Dollar Gram is a visualization that provides context to the incomprehensibly large monetary figures we hear in the media.
Despite not offering an embed code or dead-simple social sharing buttons, this visualization was a success: 2,801 tweets, 4,677 Facebook Shares and Likes, and 298 linking root domains.
Regarding the focus on substance rather than methodology, Tufte explains that the map makes a fantastic visualization medium because we’ve no reason to question methodology. A map is recognizable, allows us to put a lot of data in a small space, and displaying the data within allows us to easily understand and compare as needed. We’ll see a map before this post is done.
It should go without saying that a great piece of data visualization should tell the story honestly. Pie graphs, and especially exploded 3D pie charts, are the favorite whipping boy of data viz geeks, often because of their distortion and lack of clarity (“chart-junk”).
Bad 3D Exploding Pie Chart
I can’t believe I’m putting this in a blog post, but ‘with great power, comes great responsibility’. Yikes, quick shower, hold on.
But, it is true. If you’ve got great data, do it justice by presenting it honestly.
NPR did a visualization about the makeup of the US military that took a ton of interesting data, and represented it in a variety of formats.
Did it work? Well, it didn’t exactly kill it according to OSE (12 linking root domains, handful of tweets, and 700+ Facebook shares/likes), but I don’t suspect a news organization like NPR makes much of a link building outreach effort.
Charles Joseph Minard was a French civil engineer that created what Tufte calls, “The greatest statistical graphic ever drawn”: A map of the Napoleon’s Grande Armée’s advance and retreat into Russia.
The graphic impressively manages to depict 6 different sets of data: latitude, longitude, direction of movement, time, temperature, and size of the army.
Obviously, because this is a graphic made in the 1800s, looking up link metrics would be a bit silly.
Distilling down a big chunk of data is not easy, and the onus often falls on the designer. Tufte laments that the “lack of quantitative skills of professional artists” is what makes designing a great data visualization difficult. The best designed visualizations exist as a symbiosis between smart quantification and beautiful and elegant design.
David McCandless and Lee Byron made a graphic of Facebook post-break-up status messages by the time of year. Over 10,000 status updates in this pretty little graph:
Some fun data, for sure, and people loved it. Open Site Explorer shows 92 linking root domains, 3,000+ Facebook shares/likes, and nearly 1,000 tweets.
Though not necessary, interactivity makes comparing data in a visualization particularly fun and engaging. Sometimes the best use of a dataset is to present the viewer with the controls, letting them uncover things on their own.
I had a lot of fun playing around with Hotspots’ interactive display of Twitter buzz for this year’s Superbowl ads. It’s too new for link metrics, but I’m honestly surprised at the lack of social mentions: Only 29 shares/likes and 96 tweets?
Many ambitious datasets call for a visualization that gracefully handles the large, 30,000 foot figures way down to the super granular, all while maintaining the proper spatial relations. This allows the viewer to explore the data; he or she understands the big figures quickly, but has the opportunity to pick out some of the more minute details.
This infographic by the Technology Review details the space launches by country. It’s a two horse race between the US and the USSR/Russia, but it’s pretty fun to see how other countries have done space launches as well.
Its links were split between the PDF infographic and the post announcing the infographic. All told, it’s still one of the least linked-to (roughly 30 LRD) and socially mentioned visualizations (~300 likes/shares, 29 tweets) in this post, but as with the NPR visualization, there likely wasn’t much link building outreach done.
What’s the hook? After brainstorming ideas for clients at Distilled, this is how we narrow down our options. If you’re not telling a story to an audience that will care, you’re destined for a piece of linkbait that’ll fall flat. I could expend the effort to visualize, say, the number of fast food restaurants in Bergenfield, New Jersey (my home town – I cried when Roy Rogers was closed) over time, but who would really care?
We put together an interactive visualization for Food Service Warehouse that compared the average calories consumed per day with the percent of income spent on food broken down by country.
The result was a successful infographic (still a bit new for link metrics, but 26 LRD including newyorker.com, one.org and heifer.org, to go with 2,000+ likes/shares, and 1,200+ tweets) that highlighted the food consumption and economic disparity throughout the world.
While your data visualization should be able to speak for itself, every release should include a link off to the raw data, and some explanation of the how and why. Your writeup provides you with an opportunity to explain why your findings are important, as well as highlight other interesting findings. Sometimes your visualization warrants further explanation, but doesn’t fit within the graphic itself.
Thomson Travel’s How Music Travels – The History of Western Dance Music was a one-page interactive graphic, with further explanation and sources in the announcement blog post.
This data visualization was arguably the most successful of the ones in this post, with almost 250 LRD, 24,000+ shares/likes, and 5,000+ tweets.
So if you follow each of these principles will you definitely succeed in getting links for your data visualization? Of course not.
It’s important to remember that the data visualization is still just a medium for presenting (hopefully) interesting content, in the same way that the a blog might be home for a link bait blog post. Sure it helps to have a beautiful visualization or a crazy-awesome design for your blog, but it’s still just a frame around what matters most.
Still, in the same way that your blog should follow some best practices for allowing maximum exposure like proper keyword research, social buttons, comments, etc., I’m hoping some of Edward Tufte’s principles help improve the quality of your next great data visualization.
Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/cSdGLmeZpKI/data-visualization-principles-lessons-from-tufte
February 13th, 2012 @ // No Comments
When I began to practice SEO 8 years ago, I never would have guessed that I’d be writing a post about data visualization. Perhaps I might have foreseen myself writing about web analytics or information architecture, but data visualization seemed like something for the statistics fans. But today in web marketing, the emphasis on content has never been stronger, and it just so happens that one eminently shareable form of content is the data visualization. And I’ve come to love the crap out of data viz.
Another person that loves the crap out of data viz is Edward Tufte. ‘ET’, as he’s sometimes referred, has been preaching the merits of quality data visualization since before the world wide web existed, let alone SEO. He has authored 4 books on the topic, is a professor of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale University, and actually serves on Barack Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act panel in order to provide transparency in the use of recovery funds. I was fortunate enough to catch him when he was in Seattle during his traveling seminar tour. I learned a lot that day, and have since learned quite a bit more through reading his and others’ writing on the topic.
David McCandless’s Information Is Beautiful Blog is a must-bookmark, and his TED talk below is a great data viz primer.
Alright, enough with the intro. Let me quickly lay out what I hope this post will accomplish for the SEOmoz reader.
So far I’ve yet to say it, but there’s an elephant in the room. Infographics. The buzz around the word has reached a fever pitch. Yes, infographics are a form of data visualization, but there are so many ways that infographics are being abused that the backlash seems to be rightfully mounting. Are all infographics bad? Of course not. Just the bad ones.
As I stated earlier, and as you’ve probably seen, data visualization is a super-effective and shareable form of content creation. Now stay with me here: In this post I’m going to detail some of the principles of great data visualization as per Tufte’s teachings, with examples that fit the bill. As of the writing of this sentence, I’ve yet to pull link metrics for any of the examples I’ve got planned. By the end of this post, I’m hoping to prove to you (and myself, really) that Tufte’s principles aren’t just highfalutin, hoity-toity, stats nerd stuff, but a checklist for highly effective data visualization link building.
These principles to which I’m referring are discussed in the first chapter of Tufte’s Visual Display of Qualitative Information
Well, yeah. There have certainly been successful “infographics” that don’t actually display any real data, but that’s not really a piece of data visualization, is it? The Trustworthiness of Beards by Matt McInerney comes to mind. Regardless, it’s funny as hell and was viewed by everyone and their mom.
No matter what the rest of this post says about data visualizations for attracting links, the bottom line is that if you’ve got a good idea that would be best be shared in graphic form, roll with it. Because this graphic was originally hosted on imgur.com, the link metrics behind it are a bit fragmented. The .jpg file itself has over 200 linking root domains in OSE, and according to the designer it was, “Viewed over 1,000,000 times and featured #1 on the reddit homepage, LaughingSquid, FHM, and the LATimes”.
Tufte’s full thought on this:
Induce the viewer to think about the substance rather than about methodology, graphic design, the tech of graphic production, or something else.
Tufte wrote this originally in 1983, and while the spirit still holds, I think it should be revised for today’s times, especially framed in the context of link building: Our data visualization should provoke thought AND influence the reader to share.
Data visualizations built around economic and social matters are surefire ways to get your audience thinking and also have an inherent shareability (a product of the times and the human condition, I suppose). David McCandless’s The Billion Dollar Gram is a visualization that provides context to the incomprehensibly large monetary figures we hear in the media.
Despite not offering an embed code or dead-simple social sharing buttons, this visualization was a success: 2,801 tweets, 4,677 Facebook Shares and Likes, and 298 linking root domains.
Regarding the focus on substance rather than methodology, Tufte explains that the map makes a fantastic visualization medium because we’ve no reason to question methodology. A map is recognizable, allows us to put a lot of data in a small space, and displaying the data within allows us to easily understand and compare as needed. We’ll see a map before this post is done.
It should go without saying that a great piece of data visualization should tell the story honestly. Pie graphs, and especially exploded 3D pie charts, are the favorite whipping boy of data viz geeks, often because of their distortion and lack of clarity (“chart-junk”).
Bad 3D Exploding Pie Chart
I can’t believe I’m putting this in a blog post, but ‘with great power, comes great responsibility’. Yikes, quick shower, hold on.
But, it is true. If you’ve got great data, do it justice by presenting it honestly.
NPR did a visualization about the makeup of the US military that took a ton of interesting data, and represented it in a variety of formats.
Did it work? Well, it didn’t exactly kill it according to OSE (12 linking root domains, handful of tweets, and 700+ Facebook shares/likes), but I don’t suspect a news organization like NPR makes much of a link building outreach effort.
Charles Joseph Minard was a French civil engineer that created what Tufte calls, “The greatest statistical graphic ever drawn”: A map of the Napoleon’s Grande Armée’s advance and retreat into Russia.
The graphic impressively manages to depict 6 different sets of data: latitude, longitude, direction of movement, time, temperature, and size of the army.
Obviously, because this is a graphic made in the 1800s, looking up link metrics would be a bit silly.
Distilling down a big chunk of data is not easy, and the onus often falls on the designer. Tufte laments that the “lack of quantitative skills of professional artists” is what makes designing a great data visualization difficult. The best designed visualizations exist as a symbiosis between smart quantification and beautiful and elegant design.
David McCandless and Lee Byron made a graphic of Facebook post-break-up status messages by the time of year. Over 10,000 status updates in this pretty little graph:
Some fun data, for sure, and people loved it. Open Site Explorer shows 92 linking root domains, 3,000+ Facebook shares/likes, and nearly 1,000 tweets.
Though not necessary, interactivity makes comparing data in a visualization particularly fun and engaging. Sometimes the best use of a dataset is to present the viewer with the controls, letting them uncover things on their own.
I had a lot of fun playing around with Hotspots’ interactive display of Twitter buzz for this year’s Superbowl ads. It’s too new for link metrics, but I’m honestly surprised at the lack of social mentions: Only 29 shares/likes and 96 tweets?
Many ambitious datasets call for a visualization that gracefully handles the large, 30,000 foot figures way down to the super granular, all while maintaining the proper spatial relations. This allows the viewer to explore the data; he or she understands the big figures quickly, but has the opportunity to pick out some of the more minute details.
This infographic by the Technology Review details the space launches by country. It’s a two horse race between the US and the USSR/Russia, but it’s pretty fun to see how other countries have done space launches as well.
Its links were split between the PDF infographic and the post announcing the infographic. All told, it’s still one of the least linked-to (roughly 30 LRD) and socially mentioned visualizations (~300 likes/shares, 29 tweets) in this post, but as with the NPR visualization, there likely wasn’t much link building outreach done.
What’s the hook? After brainstorming ideas for clients at Distilled, this is how we narrow down our options. If you’re not telling a story to an audience that will care, you’re destined for a piece of linkbait that’ll fall flat. I could expend the effort to visualize, say, the number of fast food restaurants in Bergenfield, New Jersey (my home town – I cried when Roy Rogers was closed) over time, but who would really care?
We put together an interactive visualization for Food Service Warehouse that compared the average calories consumed per day with the percent of income spent on food broken down by country.
The result was a successful infographic (still a bit new for link metrics, but 26 LRD including newyorker.com, one.org and heifer.org, to go with 2,000+ likes/shares, and 1,200+ tweets) that highlighted the food consumption and economic disparity throughout the world.
While your data visualization should be able to speak for itself, every release should include a link off to the raw data, and some explanation of the how and why. Your writeup provides you with an opportunity to explain why your findings are important, as well as highlight other interesting findings. Sometimes your visualization warrants further explanation, but doesn’t fit within the graphic itself.
Thomson Travel’s How Music Travels – The History of Western Dance Music was a one-page interactive graphic, with further explanation and sources in the announcement blog post.
This data visualization was arguably the most successful of the ones in this post, with almost 250 LRD, 24,000+ shares/likes, and 5,000+ tweets.
So if you follow each of these principles will you definitely succeed in getting links for your data visualization? Of course not.
It’s important to remember that the data visualization is still just a medium for presenting (hopefully) interesting content, in the same way that the a blog might be home for a link bait blog post. Sure it helps to have a beautiful visualization or a crazy-awesome design for your blog, but it’s still just a frame around what matters most.
Still, in the same way that your blog should follow some best practices for allowing maximum exposure like proper keyword research, social buttons, comments, etc., I’m hoping some of Edward Tufte’s principles help improve the quality of your next great data visualization.
Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/cSdGLmeZpKI/data-visualization-principles-lessons-from-tufte
