Wednesday, April 4

New York runners' favorite routes

In my day job, I'm a data geek who drools over clever new visualization techniques. I should have a bumper sticker that says "I *heart* infographics" alongside my "13.1" and "I run like a girl, try to keep up."

Fortunately I'm not alone in my neurosis passion. And occasionally my two obsessions come together nicely. Case in point:

Have you ever wondered what happens to all of the data collected by Nike+ technology? Well... the clever folks and YesYesNo and Design Forces teamed up to create an on-map visualization of all of the runs Nike+ users did in Manhattan in a year.
Image source
The thicker the line, the more users were on that route. (Go figure, Central Park gets a lot of action.) To learn more about the project, click here, or watch the video:

What's your take on this type of personal data collection an analysis: amazing analytic tool or big brother?

3 comments:

  1. That is SO cool! On the Big Brother front however, I do find it kind of creepy that they are extracting data of your physical location. There's no where to hide anymore!

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  2. That's awesome. Presumably the data is only uploaded to wherever after the user has agreed to send it through- anything sent to the internet generally isn't "private" any more, as a good rule of thumb...

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