We digested quite a bit of data over the past 12 months here on PO. While we’re far from pro statisticians, we did our best to present trusted data for our readers, in a manner that emphasized clarity above all else. We hope to learn more as our blog continues to grow, but as this year draws to a close, I thought I’d look back at some of the more fun/interesting data presentations we kicked out this year. So here they are in no particular order:
1. Asia’s Internet By the Numbers (August 24th)
Internet World Stats is always an insightful place to learn more about how the world uses the internet, and after they updated their figures this summer, we dove in for a look at the Asia stats. While we added some fun interactive maps to this post, perhaps the most striking chart for me was a simple pie graph showing the breakdown of Asia’s Internet population by country. China accounts for about half of Asia’s internet population, which perhaps justifies our recent decision to increase our focus on stories from there.
2. How Japan Kept Informed After the Quake (June 8th)
We took a look at a comScore survey that asked people in Japan which types of media they thought were the most important sources of disaster information. While I’m not certain of the scope of the survey, I think that it gives a somewhat surprising overview of how Japan currently consumes media, because despite its high-tech reputation, its aged demographic shows a preference for traditional media. Note the divergence of television vs internet, as well as radio vs mobile.
3. The State of the Internet in Asia (October 25th)
Ok, I give. If I have to choose a favorite interactive from 2011, this one is probably it. It’s actually a chart/map super-combo! It was my first foray into both shapefiles for maps as well as the Google Charts API, but I think it came out ok. The numbers come from Akamai’s State of the Internet report for Q2. As you can see Korea still wins the internet speed race.
4. Visualization: India Fights #Corruption, Tweets for #AnnaHazare (April 7th)
When India lit up Twitter back in April in an outburst against corruption, activist Anna Hazare quickly became a trending topic. We sampled 1000 tweets and visualized them using one of those oh-so-trendy word clouds. That by itself is not especially fascinating, so we shaped it like a map to sort of literally represent the conversation that was happening in India on the day.
5. Google Android Outgrows Apple in Japan Smartphone Market (July 1st)
Like the pie chart above, this graph is not especially complex. But I think it shows at a glance one of the top stories that we covered in 2011: the rise of Android. This particular chart looks at Japan, and how Android reportedly surpassed iOS early in the year. Hopefully we can get some fresh numbers sometime soon to see where things currently stand in the mobile OS wars.