"Modern digital cameras capture gobs of parsable metadata about photos such as the camera's settings, the location of the photo, the date, and time, but they don't output any information about the content of the photo. The Descriptive Camera only outputs the metadata about the content." Lovely: a camera powered by Mechanical Turk.

"Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people - people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book." Both the letters described, and Robin's point, are beautiful.

"The recent generation of young turks is doubtless having fun with data scrawling but at some point it will pass people by unless there is a purpose or utility to it. They've got the engagement sorted. These things are mostly usable. What they are not is useful.

That is where people like Few come in. They work in analytics - using data for decision making. They are ideal real-life mentors, solving real life problems. They can point the way to thinking of these apps as tools for whatever outcomes." Max is right - it's a great blog. Good spot.

"The ways in which people interact with computation are changing swiftly as we move into more casual relationships with our digital services on tablets, big screens, and across social networks. We believe we have some compelling answers about how digital experiences will evolve into these new contexts. Please, follow along with us and explore these playful, dynamic instruments of discovery together." These guys are going to be worth keeping a very beady eye on; what a team.

"Ben O'Steen's talk from OKFN; lots of nice little things in here about preserving data and opening it up into a variety of forms."

Receipt as information design. Cabel is right: why do you get this *after* the meal? Other than that: an interesting move, and good use of space.

"Some pages from Willard Cope Brinton's second book (1939)". Very, very lovely.

"Fast-forward ten years, and I'm now using all those accessibility features on a daily basis. At some point during the dot-com bust it turned out that the written word was the payload, and regular people started using alternative (browsing) devices to access text from the web. Arguments about device-independent, semantic markup and graceful degradation suddenly have an additional halo of legitimacy because they affect everyone."

"Not to be outdone (well, maybe a little outdone), we've combed through hours of imaginary data here at Consumerist HQ and put together a similar animation that illustrates Starbucks' explosive growth over the past 20 years. Enjoy." I did.

Scrapes lots of things, produces a useful page which actually manages to stay up. Also, it spells TRANSPORT CHAOS the only way it should be spelt: in capitals.

"Our team of investigative journalists has compiled a database from four years' worth of company accounts to show how much the FTSE 100 companies make in pre-tax profits, and how much they pay in tax. We have published this data as a user-friendly interactive guide at guardian.co.uk/taxgap/data." But, as well as the user-friendly guide, there's also all the data. Bravo.

"I’m much more interested in automated nostalgia than automated presence - data feeds that gradually acrue in your wake, rather than constantly dragging your focus on to the next five minutes." Yes.

"News Knitter converts information gathered from the daily political news into clothing. Live news feed from the Internet that is broadcasted within 24 hours or a particular period is analyzed, filtered and converted into a unique visual pattern for a knitted sweater. The system consists of two different types of software: whereas one receives the content from live feeds the other converts it into visual patterns, and a fully computerized flat knitting machine produces the final output. Each product, sweater of News Knitter is an evidence/result of a specific day or period."

"We’ve generated what we call the Personal Annual Report for all our users. It’s a unique-to-you PDF of data, visualisations and factoids about your travel in 2008, that we’re delivering over the next week via email to every Dopplr user who travelled in 2008. To give you an example, we thought we’d show you the Personal Annual Report of someone who’s had a very busy 2008 - President Elect Barack Obama." This is super-awesome. Can't wait for mine, no matter how small it is.

"Current mass-market games present simulations of incredible fidelity. Many of these titles also push genre boundaries and offer new mechanics to players. The problem, argues Ubisoft’s Patrick Redding (FAR CRY 2), is that these two developments are disconnected. Game output appears information-rich, but how much of that information can the player actually use to play better, and how much of it is just there to be spectacular or cinematic?" I would pretty much kill to see this. Gah.

"I won’t rant about how our tax dollars pay for these images and how we deserve better. But what I do find alarming is that these documents are used to brief major decision makers. These decision makers may know a thing or two about policy and politics, but if decoding and understanding the armed forces budget is the goal of these documents, then there is a huge failure here." Datafail and slidecrime, all under one roof.

"The point here, is that the flickr team did not wake up one morning and think: “You know, if we captured THIS kind of data, we could create this mashup; so let’s create an application.” Instead, they re-used data they were already capturing, and brought out something very interesting indeed. By creating tools which match their data (and could be used with other data of the same kinds), flickr is able to expose layers of value from the rich-pickings of their own data-cloud. The good stuff is where the data are." Yes, it is.

"Some people love this kind of aggregation. Good for them. I, however, am human and my eyes glaze over when trying to comprehend a chronological stream of equally-weighted events, a format only robots could love. This is rubbish... There must be better ways of showing such “here’s what I’m up to” information." Phil talks about some problems he's been trying to solve with dashboard displays.

"The dataspace of the well-tempered environment will soon be invaded by logos, credits, banners and offers. The financial temptations will, I suspect, be too hard to resist." Loads of excellent stuff in here besides this, though. Can't recommend enough.

"The winner is Tim Graham who took manual personal data collection to another level. From email spam, to beverage consumption, to aches and pains, Tim embraced the spirit of self-surveillance. He even made his personal data available in the forums." Dataviz overload!

"Greebles are the parts that "look cool, but don't actually do anything". There's an entire discipline here composed of special effects artists and asset designers working to hide the plywood spaceships and simple game world polygons beneath an encrusted surface texture." And this is the trick to make the little bits look like part of a whole. Lovely talk from Mike at UXWeek.

"I wanted to generate some visualizations of our project’s growth, so I decided to put together a little shell script that looked at the output from git log to spit out some metrics." Ooh, nice one, Carlos!

"Users need to see results before they can ask better, more detailed questions. These feedback loops provide critical learning. Users need to get to data as quickly and easily as possible. A screen without data is delayed progress."

"CKAN is the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network, a registry of open knowledge packages and projects (and a few closed ones). CKAN is the place to search for open knowledge resources as well as register your own."

"RailRoad is a class diagrams generator for Ruby on Rails applications." Much like MattB's original .dot generator, but perhaps a bit more advanced. Useful!

Tom Carden links up a few more visualisation blogs he's following that you might not have heard of.

"The infochimps.org community is assembling and interconnecting the world's best repository for raw data -- a sort of giant free allmanac, with tables on everything you can put in a table."

"Visualizing Information: An Introduction to Information Design is a booklet I wrote and designed to introduce advocacy organizations to basic principles and techniques of information design."

"researchers found that information workers whose strong e-mail networks allow them to receive new information sooner than their peers...are likely to be more productive than their less well-connected counterparts"

"Toread represents the idea that we can be the sum of the knowledge of everyone who’s ever preceded us, that given enough time we can absorb the cumulative learnings of humanity."

Beautiful.

Note-taking application, designed as a big bucket to throw content at. Could be interesting.

FELTRON SEVEN: Mark Feltron's Annual Report, a beautiful (and entertaining) piece of information design, in which Felton summarises his past year as a corporate-style annual report.

Users' blindness to peripheral navigation elements