infoporn

One of the most interesting parts of running a large website is watching the effects of unrelated events affecting user traffic in aggregate. Web traffic is something that companies typically keep very secret, and often the only time engineers can talk about it is late at night, at a bar, and very much off the record.

There are many good reasons for keeping this kind of information confidential, particularly for publicly traded companies with complicated disclosure requirements. There are also downsides, the biggest being that is difficult for peers to learn from each other and compare notes.

John Allspaw recently created a WebOps Visualizations group on Flickr for sharing these kinds of graphs with the confidential information removed. Here's an example of a traffic drop seen both by Flickr & by Last.FM that coincided with President Obama's inauguration.

This is a site for large data sets and the people who love them: the scrapers and crawlers who collect them, the academics and geeks who process them, the designers and artists who visualize them. It's a place where they can exchange tips and tricks, develop and share tools together, and begin to integrate their particular projects.

A_B_... is a geopolitical survey of the 192 member states of the United Nations with regard to the quantitative degree to which each contributes to peace and terror in the world. The project is a dual-sided poster where the A_ side displays measures of peace, while the B_ side, measures of terror. For each of the A_B_ measures, the graph is divided into 3 rings (3 separate indexes for peace and 3 separate indexes for terror) that are themselves individual quantitative measures obtained from researchers working in the field of geopolitics. The quantitative variation for the peace and terror measures is represented as variation in line thickness: thin line=low value, thick line=high value.