My Way | Hacker News Reader

My Way

niemann.blogs.nytimes.com

74 pointsrobg8 comments

Summary: Illustrations using a Google Maps style to make various jokes.

This is a fairly content-free post, and I'd hate to see too many like these on the front page (what's next? Lolcats?), but very once in a while, a tasteful "funny illustrations" post that's a bit geeky and original is not too bad.

The problem that I have with it is that I don't find it that clever or that funny and I'm dissapointed to see it at the top of HN.

You don't find the execution clever? Is it original at least?

I don't mean to suggest that I hold you personally responsible for submitting rubbish to Hacker News. I neither hold you responsible -- because people ought to be encouranged to share interesting things -- nor think your link was rubbish!

However, I personally don't find any of the individual maps particularly clever. It's originalish, but I prefer

http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/

It's a blog of real maps, so a slightly different idea. I've just submitted the latter, so it'll be interesting to see what kind of response that gets.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1184439

This barely passed my HN threshold. I hovered over delete after I posted it. I agree with you entirely, but ultimately reached the same conclusion as you - that it was geeky and original enough. It also helped that it was the only thing interesting to me in this morning's paper.

To be honest, I'm worried more about videos like John Stewart. But it hasn't happened enough to be truly worried.

I personally like these posts occasionally because sometimes seeing how someone can create an interesting and/or different type of visualization - makes you think more about how people perceive things and how you can change the way you present to improve perception and possibly be fun or entertaining.

I'm sure it violates the Google Map TOS to modify their maps so it would be an interesting two-weekend project to create a mashup of OpenStreetMaps and phrases/sets of concepts/questions to generate these automatically. It could go viral.

First step would be calculating intersections and the angle of intersection for a limited geographic area. Then build a UI that lets users rate the "divergence" of the statements or entities they want to visualize. Then map the set of user input to your intersection db. It might be hard to teach an algorithm how to make it visually appealing but that Words app did it.

Word cloud: http://neoformix.com

I found his web site is interesting, including this "guide to conceptual illustration": http://christophniemann.com/man/bpages/gallery6.html

I've seen Niemann's work before and am always happy to find out when he does something new. What I find remarkable is how his style is so identifiable and consistent while each individual piece maintains a high degree of originality and surprise. Thanks for posting.

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