stamen design

Sep 15, 2010

Hangin’ With Mr. Bieber: Our Second MTV Video Music Awards

[by Mike]

Shawn and I are back from an epic five days in Los Angeles, our second run at the MTV Video Music Awards and our fourth live event collaboration with our good friends at MTV. The first time we visualized live Twitter traffic for the VMA's, we were tightly focused on the pre-show broadcast.

This time, MTV pulled us right into the main show!

Thanks to an invitation from Executive Producer Dave Sirulnick, our now year-long amazing working relationship with MTV's Michael Scogin, and the energetic participation of Chloe Sladden and Robin Sloan from Twitter Media HQ it was possible to drive a massive, 95 foot-wide LED screen of up-to-the-minute tweets right inside the venue, with on-air updates and voice-overs from Sway. Check out the videos for all three updates, and more from Twitter on MTV “TJ” Gabi.

The visualization itself is a response to MTV's stark, black and white art direction for this year's show. Shawn and Geraldine pulled together a new take on our particle-based visualizer for the 2010 Movie Awards, cranking up the size and animated activity of the numbers and representing tweet volume with a snowy flurry of moving blips. The piece came in three versions, one for the web-based online audience that allowed visitors to tweet right in the interface, a second for the red carpet touch screen pre-show, and a third that was piped directly to the stage at key moments in the show.

What's amazing about working this particular show is the far-reaching pop-stravaganza of it all, and the new potential for Twitter's user base to feed back into the show itself. This time, the participation of the audience expressed itself as a detailed accounting of over 2.3 million tweets for almost a hundred different artists and stars hammering out over 9,000 tweets per minute for Lady Gaga, 7,000 per minute for Cher, and almost 10,000 combined for Eminem and Rihanna.

What if next time the messages themselves work their way into the show, blasting the enthusiasm of a worldwide live audience all over the LED-and-scrim walls of the stage set? What if we expand the participation of the viewers from responding to hashtags and tweeting 190,000 times from the online visualization interface, to direct interaction with the artists on and back-stage?

Maybe this is the way television grows into a two-way medium? Robin says:

It’s got the familiar thrill of live TV, but it’s not just one-way anymore. This kind of integration pipes the conversation around a live event back into the event itself, and there’s a wonderful juxtaposition happening behind the scenes to make that happen. It’s old tools and new technology side-by-side—NTSC and HTTP co-mingling … what’s way more interesting to me is the way that live TV and real-time information actually reinforce one another. Every time something big happened in the VMAs, we saw massive, immediate spikes in related tweets.

For now, I'm happy with last decade's tired, old “beautiful but useless” being replaced with the fresh, new “helpful and flashy”, “gorgeous visualizations”.

Meanwhile, I leave you with this photo Shawn took of 3% of Twitter's hardware load and me:

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Jun 8, 2010

MTV Movie Awards 2010

We paid a visit to the MTV Movie Awards in Los Angeles this past weekend, where Eric, Sha and I spent the weekend producing and supporting an on-line/on-air visualization of live Twitter traffic about the stars and movies featured in the show. This was the most recent high-profile use of our recently-launched Eddy platform, and we were thrilled to see it all perform like a champ!

Over the course of the event, we saw approximately 528,000 tweets during the East Coast broadcast, and almost 1 million covering both broadcasts and the resulting conversation through Monday morning. Traffic peaked at almost 5,500 tweets per minute at 9:30pm EDT during the Tom Cruise and Jennifer Lopez dance performance. Sandra Bullock alone saw 2,800 tweets per minute at 10:06pm EDT. 11,100 tweets were sent directly from the application itself. Read more about this project at media.twitter.com, TechCrunch, Flowing Data, Mashable, and Social Nerdia.

View the project live at tweettracker.mtv.com, or check out this dynamic summary streamgraph of the Twitter traffic for the East Coast broadcast:

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Apr 27, 2009

Tiny Boxes

Stamen eats together.

Every day, the studio gets lunch and shares it as a group. Our Mission neighborhood is ground zero for a crazy variety of amazing food, and most of it's available to-go. As we've grown over the years, we've started to generate progressively larger volume of packaging waste every day, and finally decided that there must be a better way. Inspired by London's Tiffinbites, we bought a set of excellent aluminum boxes, and started bringing them to the local restaurants where we get our lunches.

The boxes look great, the leak-proof lids snap shut, they're durable, and they're perfect for taking leftovers home. Whenever we order food that doesn't come in self-reinforcing log form, we try to get it in our fancy metal boxes instead. Most of our favorite local spots have enthusiastically taken to using them:

• Big Lantern Chinese.
• The Monk's Kettle pretzels and burgers and killer veggie chili.
• Pakwan Pakistani/Indian.
• Yo-Yo Sushi.

Here's the current lunch leaderboard, from Sha's Daytum account:

As more creative companies make their home in the Mission, we're hoping to see more of these amazing boxes in use around the neighborhood.

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Aug 30, 2007

Digg Arc History

Digg Arc is the lastest addition to our continuing work for Digg Labs. The piece has seen several weeks of development and experimentation and three phases of development punctuated by two successive public releases. This is a visual diary of its creation, shared by Shawn Allen, Tom Carden, and me, Michal Migurski.

Arc began in Shawn's hands. We started with a few basic experiments in circular layout and basic arc geometry. At first, these took the form of simple interactive wireframes to prove that our math was right. We quickly attached these initial sketches to the Digg Flash Kit, and connected them to a source of real data.

Early interactive arc geometry experiments

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