Surf*Mind*Musings

There’s another worthy challenge, and opportunity, from Mozilla for visualizing the community. The turbo-river-of-news Lizard Feeder mashup flows data from bugs, microblogs, the wiki, etc. With the options dropdown, you can fast forward up to 200x and select any day of the last 60.

The call to action is to build on the Lizard Feeder concept with anything from ideas to pixels to code. I hacked up a grease monkey script that weights the data-source checkbox & label on the left according to the volume of flow. This provides a bit of focus + context for the recent stream. The implementation is a minimal, bit-of-an-evening starter kit (MPL) for more interesting creations.



It was my first experience with posting code to GitHub — wow, cut and paste. Get it here: http://gist.github.com/53159. It loads up jQuery and goes selector crazy. Thanks to good semantic markup with multiple classes per element and jQuery, slicing and dicing the DOM is cake. To get the filters/labels, I select “li.group-” + type + “.filter”. To get the news items, I grab “li.entry:visible” — or all LI tags with the class entry that are visible.

For ease of use, performance optimizations are needed for the label weighting effect and some baseline features for the Lizard Feeder itself are listed in the bug. Creative Director John Slater and design firm Stamen Design put together a whole different view of this data set, focused on aggregating across people while streaming that goes well beyond this bit of interaction & information design hijinx.

Here’s a quote from the call to action that sets the bar:

We aim to create a compelling visual metaphor that effectively depicts the dynamic nature and breadth of activity happening right now across planet Mozilla.

I’m plotting some typographical exploration (ala the Mozilla 1.0 screenplay or typhoGraphic) for extracting and aggregating across terms and commonalities like actor.