In an earlier post, I mentioned that my biggest criticism of the Kindle was the inability to share content. Really, it's my only MAJOR criticism of the Kindle device and platform. but this criticism is a big one.

With the Kindle 2 release announcement, I'd hoped that Amazon would come out with software/system updates that would allow for some method of sharing books/magazines/newspapers. The Microsoft Zune, which admittedly isn't tearing up the consumer electronics bestseller chart, has a feature that allows its owners to temporarily share songs with friends. It's a cool feature and helps promote the sale of new music among Zune owners. Sadly, when I currently finish reading a purchased book on the Kindle, it ends up in the online equivalent of a banker's box in the basement. I can pull it up later and re-read it, but mostly it's buried. The cynic in me says "Eh, whatever - the publisher and seller are both happy and have no incentive to let me share an e-book."

Now I knew this going into my purchase, so it's not like I can gripe too loudly - but it seems like such an obvious area for potential improvement with Kindle 2. Had they addressed this issue, I'd already have my current Kindle on Ebay or Craigslist and an order placed for the new version. Then again, I'm not convinced that allowing for the sharing of content would require the newer hardware version.

Here's how I could see it working. as a Kindle owner, I'd have a "Friends" list (not unlike IM, the Xbox 360, etc). I could choose to transfer a title (book, magazine issue, or newspaper daily) to someone on that Friends list. While it's available to them for reading on their device, it would NOT be available for me to read on mine. At some point, that title comes back to me and is then unavailable to the Friend. Like a physical book I loan out, I can't read the book at the same time as my friend.

I could see all sorts of arguments against this from the publishers. we'd lose sales to those Friends because why would they buy it if they could borrow it from you? What would stop someone from setting up their own mini Netflix-for-Ebooks and buying once to share many times? Here are a number of ideas for ways to accommodate publishers, free for the taking by the Kindle team. I think putting one or two of these in place would alleviate many concerns:

1. Limit my list of Friends to a small number - 3, even - to discourage any sort of mass sharing.
2. Limit the number of times I can add/remove people to/from my Friends list in a given period of time.
3. Limit the number of times that a title can be shared among Friends. For example, if a title has been shared with two other people, that's it. No more sharing unless someone else buys it.
4. Limit the length of time that a title can be over on that Friends list. Maybe they only get it for a week or two? 30 days?
5. Don't allow a new title to be transferred among Friends during the first 60-90 days after its release.
6. Charge the Friend receiving the book one-third of the purchase price.
7. Charge me and my Friends a premium for access to the "Sharing Among Friends" feature.

It's worth noting that NONE of these constraints are in place for physical books. When I buy the physical version of a book, I can lend it to as many people as I want. For as long as I want. Doing so doesn't cost either of us a cent. Further, I can put it into the "used books" ecosystem and the publisher doesn't see a dime after my initial purchase.

In fact, the ability to share physical books is the ONLY incentive I currently have to buy physical books that are otherwise available in Kindle form. If it's a book I'm likely to want to share among friends or family, it makes more sense for me to buy the physical book.

For example: I'm considering reading "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln" by Doris Kearns Goodwin. The physical version of that book on Amazon is $12.60, while the Kindle version is $11.34. It's the type of book that I'm likely to read and then share with a few family members and friends. So if I buy the physical version, Amazon gets my $12.60 and the publisher gets some portion of that. Beyond that, neither sees more money from me or the people I choose to share it with for this title. Like most people, I talk with friends and family about what I'm reading. so it's unlikely that they'd all rush out to buy the physical version also if they know they can borrow it from me in a couple of weeks. Even if they have Kindles, it's more likely that we'd buy the physical book just so we could share it and avoid spending the $11 EACH to read it.

BUT - imagine that I buy the Kindle version and have three friends with Kindles that would also like to read it. Assuming they've implement suggestions #1, #2, and #6 above, I could lend it to those three people. I'd have to lend it to one after another because the "license to read" the book can only be on one Kindle at a time. but each of those three people would pay $3.75 to have the book on their device for a period of time. In total, Amazon would have collected over $22 from my circle of just THREE "reading friends". A nice premium over the $12.60 they get if I go the physical route. which is the only option now for groups of friends/colleagues who like to share books.

In my view, providing some premium-level service that includes sharing could be a nice way for Amazon and the publishers to make some aftermarket money - and it doesn't have to cannibalize new sales. In fact, I think it will spur a lot of new sales for the Kindle. many people I've shown it to say they'd love to own one but they don't want to lose the flexibility of sharing a book with a friend. The ability to share via the "Whispernet" book download service would lower that hurdle, which could only be good for publisher's sales of ebooks.

Technorati Tags: amazon kindle , kindle , amazon , ebooks , publishing

Amazon announced the Kindle 2 a couple of weeks ago and a few people have asked me if I'm tempted to upgrade my Kindle to the newer version. Short answer: not really. The rest of this post is the longer answer.

I got my Kindle last April (after a wait of about three weeks) and it's been my constant companion since. It goes everywhere I go. It charges on my nightstand (though it only needs it once a week) and is in my bag when I leave the house each day. It goes to every appointment and travels anywhere I do.

There are a number of things I love about the Kindle:

• It's small and lightweight. Fits easily in a bag and the weight is negligible.
• It's got an amazing screen. I can (and have) read on this screen for hours without any eye fatigue. It looks like black text on light gray paper - not like a screen at all.
• It's convenient. I can have a new book, paper, or magazine on it in seconds.
• It enables me to read more. It lets me carry a number of different books in a single, small form factor.
• It's expandable. I could add 2GB of space to it via an SD card, which cost something like $.14. And given that any Amazon purchases can be deleted from the device and re-downloaded later, space isn't much of an issue.

Then there are some minor quibbles:

• The buttons for turning the page are too big and easy to hit accidentally.
• While the marketing materials tell you that it's got a web browser and an MP3 player, don't kid yourself. This thing is an amazing e-book reader, but a portable wireless device or MP3 player it ain't. The browser in it is rudimentary and not up to the task for anything other than very simple pages, and the MP3 player doesn't provide any controls - seriously, it can play/pause tracks in random order and that's about it.
• The relationship between my Amazon.com wishlist(s) and the Kindle's "Save for Later" list is non-existent. I can't add to the "Save for Later" list via the web, nor can I add a book to my wishlist via the Kindle.
• Technical content is best avoided. Between issues with monospace fonts and the disparity in pricing, it's just not worth the hassle. For example. at this time, "Essential WPF" by Chris Anderson (Addison-Wesley) is available in physical form for $31.49 and in the electronic Kindle edition for $28.34. With a savings of just $3.15, no monospace font support, and the inability to share among friends/colleagues, why bother? Compare that to the NY Times Bestseller from James Patterson, "Run For Your Life" - it's $16.79 in physical form and $9.99 in e-book form.

Based on the Kindle 2 product page, it looks like the only one of these that's been addressed is the button issue. The new model (shown above) does have smaller navigation buttons and it looks like holding it without pushing a button will be easier.

Then there's the major drawback. just one really: I can't share my Kindle content. More on this in another post, but this isn't addressed in the new version either.

So does the new version have any features that interest me? Just one: Text-to-speech. Apparently, it can read your book aloud to you using either built-in speakers (which are new to this model) or the headphone jack. This feature is compelling because there are times that I'm in the middle of a really good book and don't want to put it down - but life calls and I have to head to the office, an appointment, or somewhere else. At times, it'd be pretty slick to have the option of plugging the Kindle into the car's AUX jack and letting the story continue.

But are better-designed buttons and the text-to-speech feature enough to warrant an upgrade? Not to me. Maybe there is some class of Kindle user out there that REALLY can't stand the buttons or REALLY wants text-to-speech. But that seems like a pretty small niche, so I find it hard to believe that a large percentage of current Kindle owners will be scrambling to upgrade. The new version isn't yet shipping. so I guess time will tell.

Technorati Tags: kindle , amazon kindle , amazon

Among my resolutions for the new year, I want to get back to blogging regularly for the three or four of you still subscribed. My goal is to post at least once a week, which shouldn't be too hard as I've got a queue of topics and ideas lined up. This isn't exactly the first time I've said "I should blog more," though.

2008 had a few high and low points but was, thankfully, less eventful for us than 2007. Among the highs would be all the work we did and had done around the house over the summer. Everything came out very nice and a number of useful gadgets had sufficient WAF to make their way into the house as part of the upgrades. Lows, of course, would have to include those quarterly 401k statements.

I'll be posting some reviews soon of various gadgets, as well as some thoughts on the usual tech and .NET topics. I'm still doing the very occasional start-and-stop thing on Twitter and finally started doing something with Facebook in 2008 as well.

Now to follow through with these resolutions.

I don't post to Twitter all that often, but when I'm going to be at the computer for a while I will often open the timeline for people I'm following (either via the web or Twhirl) and see what people are chatting about. I looked at it in depth a few months ago as a possibility for ad-hoc chatter among my geographically distributed team (we ultimately decided to use Campfire instead). Since then, I've had occasional exchanges with people and posted the odd update to my feed.

As of this post, Twitter's down... again... it's pretty amazing that a business with this much buzz and hype around it has allowed itself to become so unstable.

The stories of its frequent downtime, complaints about scalability, and departures of technical staff are regularly cruising through my newsreader. There's even a site that tracks the various "We're down" images that they use when the site is unavailable (the one at right is from the current outage).

I can't imagine what the behind-the-scenes issues are or what sort of challenges their tech team is dealing with... but clearly there's a problem here that they need to resolve QUICKLY. You have to assume that, at some point, people will decide they've had enough and move on to alternatives like Pownce or Jaiku. Or, as Scott Hanselman suggests in this post, maybe an open and standards-based alternative pops up to fill the void.

Lots of people are looking to Twitter as an omnipresent option for quick communication of status info, marketing messages, news delivery, and as an entry point for simple API messages. Most businesses and web properties would kill for that sort of interest and traffic... to have all that opportunity pass by because of stability issues would be such a waste.

On the other hand, imagine the case studies (for both Business and CompSci)...

Technorati Tags: twitter , stability , web architecture

When the Kindle was released late last year, I was skeptical. I like the idea of an e-book reader, but it's so expensive. Eventually, a few things occurred that convinced me to order one:

• I contemplated having instant access to major papers like the NY Times and Washington Post each morning, as well as local papers like the Denver Post.
• I took a family trip and packed a bunch of books to take with me. I typically have a few books that I'm reading at once -- some fiction, a non-fiction, and a technical book. I can't two of the same type at once, though, lest I get facts or characters mixed up.
• I saw the screen in person.

So at the end of March, I placed my order and started the backorder wait. It arrived a couple of weeks ago and, since then, it looks like Amazon's manufacturers are caught up. My total wait was almost three weeks (18 days), but at this point, the Kindle product page on Amazon.com says that it's in stock and available for shipping... they're even showing photos of an Amazon warehouse with pallets of Kindles.

Short Review

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the device. I'm not yet 100% convinced that I'll always be a paperless reader (when content's available), but if I have a choice between paper version and Kindle version, I think paper will be a rare exception rather than the norm.

Longer Review

Some other thoughts (in no particular order):

• The design's general "look" an aesthetics are not terrible, but not great either. I'll call it "functional." Some of the reviews and feedback out there have really bashed the industrial design of this thing -- calling for Amazon to hire some Apple designers and that sort of thing. I actually don't think it's quite that bad. It certainly is smaller and lighter than I expected it to be (both are good things!).
  
• The design's high points are the screen (the e-ink is AMAZING. No, seriously... AMAZING!), providing an integrated keyboard (vs on-screen "soft" keys), and the main navigation element -- the scrolling wheel/button. The wheel is a very easy way to move through your library, look things up, bookmark, etc. I don't know what the material is they're using to indicate the scroll position along the right margin, but it's pretty cool and works well even in low-light (the Kindle is NOT backlit).
  
• The design's main low point is the fact that 75-80% or so of both sides of the device are dedicated to buttons for Next/Prev page. It's WAY too easy to hit those buttons accidentally. I'd have preferred to see the top 50% of both sides dedicated to buttons so that there are more ways to hold it without accidentally hitting them. Also, the device can play MP3 and audio books - but the volume buttons and headphone jack are on the bottom. If I'm reading in bed, I'm usually holding it from the bottom or resting it on my chest as I read. Also not great - the power on/off and wireless on/off buttons are on the back of the device, which make them hard to reach when its in the cover. On the cover front -- it's not bad, but lots of people seem to have flakey covers that don't really "grip" the reader as it should. Mine seems fine... I definitely prefer reading with it in the cover as that gives me more flexibility in how I hold it. I can see getting a different cover later, though, that holds the Kindle in place at all four corners.
  
• From a software/functionality perspective, I'm very impressed. With the wireless turned on, it's very easy to search and navigate the online Kindle store. You can buy material right from the device and it shows up within a minute or so. Very slick. When looking at a book's product page on the device, you have the option to "Save for Later" (essentially bookmarking the product page) or you can download a sample chapter. When browsing the Kindle store from your PC, you can send a sample chapter to your device with just one click. In either case, the sample is on the device in less than a minute. When viewing your library on the device, you can change how things are sorted and set filters for books, periodicals, or both. Personally, I'd also like the ability to organize things into folders and show/hide downloaded samples.
  
• The "lookup" feature is slick - you can choose "lookup" on any line of text and it provides quick definitions for each of the non-trivial words in that line of text. You can further dive into each word for a more in-depth definition, or search the web and/or Wikipedia for the word.
  
• Speaking of the web, there is an experimental web browser on the device... it seems similar in capability to the Pocket IE browser I have on my Windows Mobile phone. Plain HTML pages are fine -- but sites that use any sort of Flash, JavaScript, or fancier rendering will suffer. Still, it's good enough for occasional basic use.
  
• The keyboard is usable enough for searches and quick notes, but not something I'd want to compose long email messages with. Conveniently, it's got a dedicated "Search" button that calls up a context-sensitive search bar from anywhere (i.e., if in the Kindle Store, the Search bar will search the store for your criteria). There are also shortcuts you can use in the search bar to search other contexts - @wiki searches wikipedia, @store searches the Kindle store, etc. There are a few other shortcuts, such as ALT+T, which displays the current time in the corner (humorously, it often shows it in plain English ("six minutes till four").

There are some things I'd like to see changed down the road, either through firmware or in a later hardware generation:

• It seems there's no relationship between my on-device "Save For Later" selections and an Amazon wishlist. I'd much rather have a Kindle-specific wishlist that I can add to and manage from both the device and the Amazon.com site. Even if I create another Wishlist on the site and force myself to use it just for Kindle books, I don't see a way to get at that wishlist from the device. And while I can use the "Send Sample Chapter" option from the site, I can't add something to my "Save for Later" list from the site.
  
• For subscriptions, such as the New York Times, I'd like to be able to tell it how many days I want to keep on the device by default. Currently, it stores several days of periodicals... choosing NY Times from the "Home" list displays all of the publication days so I have to make another selection. Since all of my Kindle content is backed up and available from Amazon (should I delete it from the device), I'd like an option to only keep the most recent issue of a periodical. It's rare that I'd want the Saturday paper on Sunday... so delete it when Sunday arrives and I can manually download it if the need arises.
  
• I want to see more content, particularly with magazines. The list of available magazines is pretty slim... I'd love to see Wired, Esquire, Inc, and a few others become available. I recognize that the lack of color and quality photos would be a sacrifice for magazines, particularly for something like Wired, but I'd forego that for the convenience of having the article content with me all the time.
  
• No "Chronicles of Narnia" in Kindle form?! There's also little in the way of Tom Clancy, John Grisham, and classic Stephen King (if you're into those authors).
  
• You can subscribe to blogs on the device, but most of them are $1.99/month. Not a freakin' chance, Amazon. Between Newsgator Go on my phone, FeedDemon on my PCs, and the basic web browser built into the Kindle, I can't imagine paying for content that is available for free in so many other ways.
  
• The price has GOT to come down... I thought long and hard about this purchase. Ultimately, I figured I could Ebay the device if I decide I don't like it and recoup most of my cost... so I went for it. If it were $100 cheaper, though, I think it'd be more of a no-brainer. I suspect a lot of the cost is tied up in the "Whispernet" wireless service (provided by Sprint) - which doesn't cost the customer anything after the initial purchase.

Again, I'm very happy with the purchase and haven't had any buyer's remorse at all. The Kindle has been with me constantly over the last couple of weeks and... so far, at least, the convenience of having lots of different reading material on me all the time is worth any of the drawbacks I've run into.

Technorati Tags: amazon , kindle , amazon kindle , ebook , review

Looks like Amazon is starting to shorten the delay on Kindle orders... when Jeff Bezos posted this on their front page apologizing for the long shipping delays, the typical wait was six weeks (with some reports of almost 8 weeks!).

In his open letter to customers, Bezos promised they were ramping up production and hoped that, within a "few weeks", they'd be able to announce enough stock for same-day shipping... and backorders would be a distant memory.

At the time, I hadn't yet ordered one... but I had been considering it for weeks. I have to admit to not (yet) being 100% convinced that an e-book reader will be for me. However, I typically have a few things I'm reading at once (fiction, non-fiction, a tech book, magazines, etc)... so the idea of having all of that (along with some reference material) with me all the time is very intriguing. After taking a trip last month where I brought a few fairly thick books (and wanted to bring a couple others), I figured I'd give it a shot. What's the worst that can happen -- I hate it, put it on Ebay, and possibly take a slight loss on it (though Ebay sales are currently closing for well over the Amazon retail price). So we'll see.

Anyway, I pulled the trigger and went for it. I ordered on March 31, settled in for a 6 week wait, and was surprised to get this email tonight (2 weeks to the day from my order):

We now have estimated delivery dates for the Kindle order you placed
on 3/31/08, #XXX-XXXXXXX-XXXXXXX. We are now estimating that
your Kindle will arrive between 4/22/2008 and 4/29/2008. We'll contact you
again to let you know when your order is shipped.

Based on the Kindle forums, Amazon's shipping then slightly earlier than their estimates - so with some luck I'll see it early in the week after next.

Technorati Tags: amazon , kindle , ebook

Regular readers of this blog will know that my background is primarily in the Microsoft development world, with the odd foray into Java (and more recently, experiments with Ruby and Processing). So when Microsoft announces some new tool or framework, I'll pay attention and see what's up.

Right now, there's a good deal of hype and excitement around Silverlight... which sounds great to me in theory, but in practice has been largely a disappointment.

And I saw that as a user, not a developer. I can't even think about using it for development at this point because, frankly... it simply doesn't run for me as a casual web user.

Rich Ziade nails some of the issues in his post from Friday, called "Microsoft-Centered Design":

So I'm perusing the various blog posts that have streamed out of the MIX 08 conference and some interesting talks are available online. So I head on over to the MIX 08 site to view some sessions and I run into this:  [image of the "You need Silverlight" placeholder] ..  Yep, I need to download Real Player, I mean Silverlight to watch these videos. Silverlight, for the less enlightened, is Microsoft's foray into streaming video, rich media and rich apps on the Web (aka Microsoft's Flash).

I agree with Rich's premise that Silverlight apps (or at least the demos we've seen so far) don't really provide much reason to use it over Flash -- a time-tested, well-supported platform for rich web apps.

But I find the problem with Silverlight to go even deeper:  For me, it simply doesn't work.

I use Firefox as my browser... and despite lots of examples and statements about Silverlight being not only cross-browser, but also cross-platform, I can't get it to run in Firefox. On any machine I've tried. To date, that's five machines. All of them are running similar setups:

• The most recent production version of Firefox (currently 2.0.0.12), with extensions:
• del.icio.us Bookmarks (for quick access to my bookmarks)
• Firebug (for debugging and development)
• Flashblock  (to block Flash content from loading until/unless I want to see it)
• Google Toolbar  (because... well... because it's the Google toolbar)
• Remember the Milk for Gmail   (because seeing my tasks right next to email rocks)
• Tab Mix Plus  (because I want to choose how/when/where new tabs are opened in Firefox)
• IE Tab (see below)

Note that what I'm NOT running is the NoScript extension, which reportedly causes problems for Silverlight in Firefox.

I can't tell you how many times on these machines I've gone to download the various versions of Silverlight and see if maybe... just maybe... THIS TIME will be different. So far, no joy.

The issue isn't made any easier by the various versions floating around... Silverlight 1.0, Silverlight 1.1 Alpha, some sort of refresh/CTP version for 1.1, and now Silverlight 2.0 as of Mix08. This thing's been around for just a year now and there are already more SKUs of Silverlight than there are of Windows XP.

Of course, things do appear to work fine in IE7. But I don't want to run IE7 as my browser. I've got Firefox and its extensions tweaked to be exactly the way I like it.

The only way I'm able to get Silverlight content to run inside of a Firefox window currently is via the "IE Tab" extension -- which loads the IE rendering engine inside of a Firefox tab. In doing that, though, I lose the integration with the rest of Firefox. And it's only cosmetically different from having two browsers open to begin with. I don't want that.

I would like this to work. I really would. So far, it seems that the newer Silverlight 2.0 will run inside of Firefox -- however, the vast majority of the Silverlight content out there (which, as Rich points out, could be provided in Flash without losing any functionality) is NOT targeting Silverlight 2.0. It seems to mostly be in 1.0 or 1.1.

So until Microsoft gets this working correctly in Firefox, I find myself having to make a decision every time I come across that drives-me-up-a-wall "Get Microsoft Silverlight" badge -- do I really care enough about this content to deal with the frustration and go outside my normal workflow to view it?

More often than not, the answer is "no," which is a shame because there are some interesting videos out there in Silverlight format (the screenshot above is from Jon Udell's Perspectives video audio interview on MS Robotics).

As a developer, the notion of using XAML to build applications that can be run via Silverlight as well as via a WPF rich client sounds really cool. But how can I get excited about a new developer platform that's completely broken for me as a user?

Update: In the comments, Jon Udell clarified that the Perspectives link above is audio and not video and I've since downloaded the MP3 version. The "Get Silverlight" badge made it look like a video to me and seeing that badge repeatedly without being able to get it working in Firefox prompted the post. Thanks, Jon!

Technorati Tags: silverlight , mix08 , firefox , microsoft , web development

The other day, I posted some thoughts on why I think data visualization has recently become more popular. Among the reasons I mentioned was the fact that visualizations have become more familiar and accessible. Along the way, lots of creative people have begun to create visualizations for things that aren't typically displayed in charts, maps, or other graphical representations.

Things like song lyrics. Or video games. Or the minutiae of their lives. Seriously.

Let's start with song lyrics... over the last few weeks, lots of people have begun to upload charts that represent the lyrics from popular music. I caught wind of it via some blogs posts a while back and have cracked up at some of the charts people are creating. As always, a picture is worth a thousand words (or a hit song).

The chart above (from Flickr user Nusm) is a graphic representation of Bill Withers' song, "Ain't No Sunshine". The one to the right (from user jrgkgb1) is from "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic" by the Police.

There is a Flickr Photo Pool called "Song Chart" where some very creative people have been adding more and more examples. Some of them are obscure songs that I don't recognize, while others are from popular music and instantly recognizable.

The pool appears to have been started by Flickr user "boyshapedbox", who is himself responsible for dozens of great examples. The first one I came across, was a Venn diagram of "Sweet Dreams" by the Eurythmics. Instantly familiar.

One awesome response to the "Sweet Dreams" diagram came from commenter "elizaday418":

"well. who am i to disagree?"

If you're familiar with the song, that's hilarious. If you're not... trust me, it's still hilarious.

As you might guess, the goal with most of these is not necessarily to create "academically correct" data representations. The goal is simply to entertain, which I think is an important part of raising an awareness and understanding of modern data visualization.

Most readers and consumers of information are familiar with basic chart types -- lines, bars, and pies. What people are not always aware of are which types of charts and diagrams are best for what they want to communicate. Newer, less traditional charts are also starting to be increasingly used - such as the treemaps used in utility programs and this timeline-based area chart used last week in the New York Times to show box office receipts over time. As the art and science of visualization advances, expressing humor in visual form is a great way to maintain interest among readers.

Graphic designer Joel Friesen created a slideshow of charts and diagrams as a way to express why a woman should date him. Pie charts are used to express the number of people who think he's nice versus the number that think otherwise. A line chart is used to represent the levels of his wit, sexiness, and charm over the years. Potential dates will be glad to see that the "number of puppies kicked" chart remains a flat line at zero. Unfortunately for Joel, the woman he created the charts for left ultimately left him. And stole his rice cooker. Thankfully, he had an awesome set of charts he could turn into a humorous "letter to shareholders  for Joel, Inc." (included at the above URL).

Projects such as “online dating” have opened up entire fields that were, up till now, totally ignored. I have increased personal appearances in dating activities such as “the pub”. Meeting one on one with potential clients has increased the likelihood of acquiring dates.

Similarly, Craig Robinson has created a series of pie charts to serve as an "audit of my life so far." Some of them are hilarious, such as "% of life living with a beard" or "% of neighbors I've been friends with", while others are more somber, such as "% of life that my father was alive". The top of the presentation features small photos of Craig, taken throughout his life at 4-5 year intervals.

Nicholas Felton has created a "personal annual report" for the last three years (see 2005, 2006, and 2007). These incorporate more than just pie charts, though and, in addition to being humorous visualizations of data, they're also wonderful pieces of art. Given the detailed tracking in the content, they also leave me wondering how Nicholas manages to log some of this information throughout the year. His reports have included number of flights taken (including their relationship to distance to the moon), average temperatures throughout the year, house plants killed, museums visited, date of discovery for first gray hair, quantities of taxi and subway trips, and restaurant visits by food type. Awesome.

One other talented designer to point out is Jessica Hagy, who creates small charts and diagrams at her "indexed" blog -- each entry is simply an index card with a humorous visualization. How she manages to put one or two of these up each day and keep them so fresh and entertaining is beyond me. A collection of her work is now available in book form. For example:

Some other miscellaneous examples:

• The infoshetics blog, mentioned in my previous post, also recently had an entry pointing to some very funny examples of humor in visualization.
• Wall Street Fighter, a humorous blog about making money, posted a list of other examples back in December (including one of the earlier examples I've seen from the song chart meme).
• And finally... one of my all-time favorite "chart-jokes" (found via "Boing Boing", but I've since seen examples of it in a number of places -- not sure who the original creator is):

Ok readers (both of you)... which ones have I missed? Make me laugh.

Technorati Tags: humor , data visualization , infoporn , charts , jokes