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The State of the Web: An Interactive HTML5 Infographic

Yes, we all know the Internet is huge and it’s getting bigger all the time.

But more important than its size is its impact. The UN considers the web so vital to communication, self-education and global participation that it’s called Internet access a human right, in fact.

The web can be a barometer for how we feel about issues and events. For a long time, it’s been a huge part of where and how we spend money, as well. It’s also a battleground of the modern economy and is quickly becoming our de facto news source, too.

Here’s a mammoth, interactive infographic that shows many touchpoints in the overall landscape of the web. It’s even got a bit of real-time data thrown in, too. Click the image below to launch the infographic itself.

Source Online Schools

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, ahlobystov

More About: infographics, internet

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Find & Make Your Own Infographics With Visual.ly

If you like clever data visualizations, you’ll love Visual.ly, a startup that lets you find and make infographics with all kinds of web-based data.

The site aims to be a repository for graphically organized information on the web, as well as a marketplace and community for publishers, designers, researchers and everyday web users.

Visual.ly contains three main components. First, it’s a search engine for web-based infographics. Second, it’s a silo of data from government agencies, non-profits and other research- and data-focused entities.

Third, Visual.ly is a web-based platform for creating infographics of your own — no graphic design experience or software required.

Already, the site boasts a collection of 2,000 infographics in its indexed and searchable galleries, as well as 60,000 users who signed up for beta access.

Here’s a demo of the site:

In a release, co-founder and CEO Stew Langille said, “We knew we were onto something big, having seen the power of data visualization work so dramatically across the Web.”

The service’s main infographic creation tool will launch in a few months.

Not only does the site aggregate and help you find great infographics, it also lets you make infographics of your own using various types of data. A demo of this capability can be seen right now with the Twitter Visualizer, a tool that lets you build and customize Twitter infographics.

Right now, you can use Visual.ly’s Twitter tool to generate infographics based on yours and others’ Twitter usage. For example, here’s a visualization showing my tweet data compared to data from Tal Siach, a Visual.ly co-founder:

Top image based on a photo from iStockphoto, spxChrome

More About: infographics, startup, visual.ly, visually

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Do We Need an Internet Freedom Movement?

The prevailing wisdom that “technology created by innovative companies will set us all free” is anything but reality says Rebecca MacKinnon, an Internet freedom activist that spoke at TED Global on Tuesday in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Opening her remarks by contrasting Apple’s famous “1984” ad, in which the technology giant asserts its role as an agent of empowerment, with the company’s controversial removals from the app store, MacKinnon went on to describe an Internet increasingly in need of a new system of checks and balances.

That need comes from the growing power that corporations wield on the Internet, and in turn, their ability to shape what we can and can’t do in our digital lives, MacKinnon said.

The problem often asserts itself most visibly abroad, for instance in China, where Internet companies are awarded “Self-Discipline Awards” for conforming to the nation’s censorship policies. And while that problem may be seen as a Great Firewall of China issue, she notes that it’s often western technology that enables the regime to enforce its restrictions.

She also points to post-revolution monitoring and restricted access to certain sites in Egypt and Tunisia. “Even in democratic society we don’t have good answers how to balance the need for security on one hand and the protection of free speech on the other in our digital networks,” she said.

In response, MacKinnon believes that the citizens of the Internet need to take a more active role in pressuring corporations and the government to preserve free speech. She said, “Each of us has a vital role to play in building a world in which the government and technology serve the world’s people and not the other way around.”

MacKinnon has a book on the subject entitled “Consent of the Networked: A Citizen’s Guide to the Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom” due out early next year. In the meantime, here’s her talk from TED Global:

Do you think that Internet users need to play a more active role in pushing for Internet freedom? Let us know in the comments.

Image courtesy of James Ducan Davidson / TED

More About: apple, censorship, china, rebecca mackinnon, TED, ted global

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See a Video of Photovine, Google’s Mysterious Photo Sharing Service

After appearing merely in the form of a short description and a support page, Google’s upcoming photo sharing service Photovine now has a little bit more to offer: a registration form and an official teaser video.

The registration form currently accepts invite requests, and the confirmation email claims that Photovine will be “slowly rolling-out invites starting later this month.”

The video (below), however, tells us a little bit more about how Photovine works. A user starts out a theme or a topic with a photo – in the video, the topic is called “warm and fuzzy” and starts with a photo of a dog that fits the description. Then, other users chime in, and after a while you get a lot of “warm and fuzzy” photos, which explains Photovine’s motto: “Plant a photo, watch it grow”.

The service seems incredibly simple to use, but there’s a lot we don’t know: how do you manage your friends on the network, how do you share photos on social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+, and so forth. We’ll have more as soon as we try it out.

More About: Google, photo sharing, Photovine, video

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How Mobile Tech Is Being Used to Fight Carmageddon

Carmageddon is poised to bring Los Angeles to a standstill this weekend, but several mobile tech companies are helping commuters handle the chaos.

Carmageddon is the term many Los Angeles residents are using to describe the planned closure of the 405 Freeway, a road that carries more than 280,000 cars per day across L.A. The city of Los Angeles plans to close a 10-mile section of Interstate 405, starting at 7 p.m. Friday and reopening at 6 a.m. Monday.

The 405 closure is expected to bring the city’s traffic to a crawl. Many business are shutting down early so their employees don’t get caught in the traffic, while others like the Getty Center are closing entirely for the weekend. The entire city will be affected.

While some companies are dreading the upcoming weekend, several companies are seizing Carmageddon as an opportunity. Mobile traffic app Waze, for example, has teamed up with ABC to provide its local L.A. television station (KABC-TV) realtime traffic information. Waze determines traffic conditions by tracking the GPS data provided by the 4.5 million users of its mobile app, which provides greater detail and insight into a city’s traffic conditions.

Waze has also partnered with UCLA, Metro and other others “to get the word out about alternate routes.” It’s even started a website, BeatCarmageddon.com as part of its campaign.

AT&T is also helping commuters avoid the pain of Carmageddon. The wireless provider will be sending text messages to AT&T customers within 25 miles of the Carmageddon zone, warning them of the closure and suggesting they use a navigation app like AT&T Navigator.

While these initiatives aren’t going to help Los Angeles residents avoid Carmageddon (there is no avoiding it), smartphone technology will likely give smart commuters an edge as they try to navigate L.A.’s congested roads.

Image courtesy of Flickr, neoporcupine

More About: att, Carmageddon, L.A., Los Angeles, Mobile 2.0, waze

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How One Man Flies Like a Bird [VIDEO]

What does it feel like to fly like a bird by using a jet-propelled wing? Only one man on Earth knows, and he shared his story with the crowd at TED Global in Edinburgh, Scotland, on Tuesday.

Yves Rossy’s invention allows him to fly by attaching to his back a four-engine jet suit with wings, which he starts up after jumping out of a helicopter or plane.

Unlike similar aircraft, Rossy’s has no steering controls. Rather, he uses his body to steer — arching his back gains altitude and pushing his shoulders forward sends him into a dive. “If you put steering in it’s more like an airplane. … I wanted to keep freedom of movement,” Rossy told the TED Global crowd.

Traveling at speeds of up to 190 miles per hour and a height of 3,000 meters, the aircraft can stay in the air for about 10 minutes, which was enough time for Rossy to cross the English Channel. He also recently flew above the Grand Canyon.

The device isn’t quite ready for mass consumption, however. Rossy, who served as both a commercial and military pilot earlier in his life, has had to use the wing’s escape parachute about 20 times — sometimes after becoming disoriented in the clouds, others after more than one of the engines fails.

Rossy, who does hope that one day his invention or something like it could be used by anyone, summarized the experience by saying, “I don’t have feathers, but I feel like a bird sometimes. It’s an unreal feeling.”

You can check what one of his flights and invention look like in the video below from his Grand Canyon mission:

Image courtesy of James Duncan Davidson / TED

More About: aviation, TED, ted global, yves rossy

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Percolate Hopes to Become the Future of the Blog [INVITES]

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Percolate

Quick Pitch: Percolate bubbles up relevant content for you to comment on.

Genius Idea: Re-imagining the blog and what it means to be a publisher.

Content creation abounds on the web, whether it be on blogs, Facebook, Twitter or via other self-publishing tools. Still, James Gross and Noah Brier, co-founders of private alpha startup Percolate, believe that the barrier to create content is too high for most people.

It’s fitting, then, that the Percolate product is designed to streamline the flow between what we consume on the web and what we produce.

The application is structured into a two-pane dashboard that presents the user with content “percolating” — or bubbling up in popularity — from sources such as Google Reader and Twitter in a right-hard pane called the “The Brew.”

The Brew is meant to be your muse, a place to peruse hot stories and get inspired to add your own commentary. Here you can tag a post as “interesting,” “win,” “awesome,” “fail” or make up a tag of your own, and add a comment in the process. In so doing, as Gross sees it, you become self-publisher with as little friction imaginable.

To the left of The Brew is the second “What’s Percolating” pane. This is where Percolate-published stories from the folks you follow will appear.

Ultimately, Gross sees Percolate as the next big evolution of the blog. Twitter first transformed blogging by shrinking the big empty box, he says. Now Percolate is taking the box away completely.

It’s an ambitious mission, no question, but Gross and Brier may be able to pull it off. For starters, Percolate in its current form is just an early-stage, 1.0 product. Its pane design hints at a not-too-distant mobile future where users will able to browse and create content with their fingers in touch-driven environments.

Percolate’s primary flaw is that the intended experience does not automatically manifest itself to new users. “Just like Twitter, until you start to follow other people, it doesn’t make any sense,” Gross admits.

Gross and team hope to address the on-boarding obstacle in the months ahead. The bootstrapped startup also plans to announce that five Fortune 500 businesses are licensing its API, at a cost, some time in August. API license fees will be the startup’s moneymaker, as Gross sees huge opportunity in helping brands figure out how to create content and become better publishers in their social channels.

Percolate is still mid-brew, but 500 Mashable readers can get private beta access to the product now.

Image courtesy of Flickr, pkhamre

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

More About: bizspark, content creation, curation, Percolate, spark-of-genius

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Is Sevenly the Next TOMS Shoes?

Sevenly is bringing social good to online shopping by selling a new T-shirt each week designed for a partner non-profit. Each shirt will be available for seven days, with $7 from each sale going towards the charity.

Like TOMS shoes, Sevenly is embarking on philanthropic ecommerce. Where TOMS shoes on a one-for-one model (every pair of shoes purchased also donates a new pair to a person in need), Sevenly is pairing up donation and design in a social way.

Sevenly is based on a model where (hopefully) everyone who buys a t-shirt will share their purchase on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media profiles, thereby creating a chain of giving and cool shirts.

Co-founders Dale Partridge and Aaron Chavez were motivated to create the site after seeing the amount of worthy non-profits that shut down within their first year open. The problem isn’t apathy so much as a lack of following, funding and awareness.

Partridge hopes Sevenly’s model will address all three of those challenges, helping new organizations stay afloat. “People just wanted to help and they had no practical way of giving,” Partridge says. “Clicking the donate button on a charity’s website doesn’t work for our generation.”

During its starting period, Sevenly is partnering with more established organizations in order to build their own brand reputation. Their first partnership with International Justice Mission raised $6,125 by selling 875 shirts. Each shirt’s sale provided care for one day for a girl rescued from the sex trade.

This week’s design benefits World Relief, an organization aiding raped and abused women in the Congo. The shirt comes in grey for men and white for women and costs $24.

Later this summer, Sevenly plans to shoot videos in the countries they’ve benefited, showing their supporters how that t-shirt money has been put to good use. A planned partnership with Malaria No More will hopefully lend some celebrity star power to the site and its mission.

Does a good cause make you more likely to buy a t-shirt? Let us know in the comments.

More About: non-profit, sevenly, shirt, social entrepreneurship, social good, social media, startup, t-shirt

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Imogen Heap’s Tech-Infused Gloves Create Music on the Fly

Grammy Award-winning musician Imogen Heap used her time on the TED Global stage on Tuesday in Edinburgh, Scotland to not just perform, but to demonstrate an entirely new way of creating music.

Using a pair of gloves equipped with wireless mics, an accelerometer, a magnetometer, a gyroscope and a variety of other sensors, Heap created a song on the fly — complete with sounds from a multitude of instruments and effects — using only her body movements and hand gestures.

The performance was more than two and a half years in the making, the culmination of a project that Heap first became interested in after seeing the beginnings of such technology at MIT. In an interview with Mashable afterwards, Heap told me she wanted to use body movement to create music so she could “communicate the hidden 50% of the performance.”

Those movements include, for example, the ability to record a loop by opening her hand, filtering sound by bringing her hands together and panning by pointing in the desired direction. Volume can also be manipulated with some fitting gestures — a “shh” movement initiates quiet mode and a horn sign prompts “rock out mode.” The sensors that Heap’s gloves are equipped with send the movement data back to a computer that then blends it all together to create a relatively robust piece of music in real-time.

Seeing is most certainly believing in the case of Heap’s gloves, and the artist now plans to start using the gloves with some regularity during performances. Ultimately, however, she wants to be able to add features that would enable her to create an entire 60-90 minute performance “walking on stage with nothing but the gloves,” she said.

Enhancements that would enable that to become a reality include the ability to play a wider variety of instruments using hand gestures, let multiple musicians performance simultaneously (like a drummer) and the ability to let the audience participate in song creation. Thinking even further out, Heap told me she wants to be able to, “invite fans on stage … and let them be a part of the performance from their own bedroom,” by leveraging connected gloves and hologram technology.

Of course, that would require the gloves to become more than a one-of-a-kind item, but Heap says she’s been thinking about how to do that in the wake of the response so far. Commercializing them isn’t her primary goal, but she says she’d be very excited to see how it can empower other artists.

“I love the idea that you can buy a pair of these gloves … be connected to an iPhone app … and capture sound on the street and start making beats while you’re waiting at the bus stop … and upload that to a database,” she said.

Image courtesy of James Ducan Davidson / TED

More About: imogen heap, music, TED, tedglobal

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The Google+ Cheat Sheet [PIC]

Already using Google+? Follow Mashable News for the latest about the platform’s new features, tips and tricks as well as our top social media and technology updates.

Are you addicted to Google+ like millions of others early adopters? Do you spend your Saturday nights hanging out in Google+ Hangouts?

You’re not alone. As Google releases more invites to its social network, more people are trying to learn the ins-and-outs of the Google+ ecosystem. We’ve already taught you how to upload iPhone photos to Google+, make a Google+ desktop app and get your own Google+ vanity URL, but there’s still a lot to Google+ ewe haven’t mastered yt.

That’s why we were excited when we stumbled across a Google+ cheat sheet, whose origin we’ve traced to Google+ user Simon Laustsen. The cheat sheet includes most of the common syntax, hotkeys and tips you need to know to use Google+ like a pro.

We’ve embedded the English version of the cheat sheet below. If you’re one of our many international readers, we have good news for you: it’s been translated into a dozen languages already.

[via Buzzfeed]

More About: Google, Google Plus, social networking

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