Normally an infographic is perfect for presenting this kind of data, because a national surplus can easily be separated, hierarchically, into different budget lines. Plus, large figures like ‘a billion dollars’ are normally not sums of money with which the general public handles, so using some kind of shape or group of objects are useful for proportional comparison. Granted, percentages and bar charts can convey something similar, but using graphics related to the item in question bestows a stronger connection between the number and the item; for instance, saying a plane crash claimed 62 lives is one thing, but having a row of stick figures emphasises that number’s real-world meaning.

Now let’s take a look at the ABC surplus ‘infographic’.

Is there anything that conveys any information apart from the raw numbers themselves? No. It’s broken down into Savings, Revenue, and Spending, but that’s the way a basic spreadsheet would be arranged too. The only real difference between a table and this ‘infographic’ is that some of the numbers are (physically) larger, and some are smaller. This would be useful if the size of the numerals were relative to the size of their value, but this isn’t the case.

This is the worst possible way to display information, for two reasons. First, the size of the typeface is meaningless. Why is the number 50 in a larger type size than 3,073 (or for that matter, 2.9 billion)?

But perhaps much more importantly, it doesn’t really make sense to present these numbers next to each other in the first place, since one’s cigarettes, one’s people, and one’s dollars. The important number with the cigarettes is actually $660 million, the dollar figure saved. A less brain-dead way to show this would be:

The smart way we used to show information before shitty 'infographics'

From my version you can actually compare the amount saved from cuts to foreign aid versus cancer stick subsidies. As for public service staff, all we know from the original graphic is that 3,073 people are getting shitcanned; we have no idea how much money that actually saves, hence the question mark.

And guess what, this STILL isn’t an infographic, it’s just a bar chart. Let’s infographic-ise it:

Ha ha. Get it?

Was that really so hard? I did that in five minutes in Photoshop. And that’s even a pretty shitty infographic.

So where did ABC (and so many others) go wrong?

• They failed to understand what an infographic really is. An infographic conveys data the same way a chart does, but it adds another semantic dimension to the data by representing them with something similar or related to the data’s real-world counterpart.
• They tried to mix figures with different units. You can’t compare cigarettes to dollars. You can only compare dollars to dollars.
• They tried to mix figures with different scope. You can’t compare a number per person (e.g. cigarettes) with a number for the whole country (dollars, etc).
• They used inconsistent powers. In the Revenue section, for example, non-sales tax receipts are estimated at $294,907 million and tobacco sales taxes at $5.85 billion. Quick, which is more? The billion figure, right? Oh, wait…

There are so many things wrong with this graphic that it probably actually confuses people more than it actually teaches them anything about the national budget.

The next time you think about doing an infographic, consider whether you’re capable of planning out how the infographic will actually convey information, or whether you just want to jump on the infographic bandwagon currently drowning out real journalism.

I hope someone asks him about the categories.

All half-joking aside, the categories really do suck. And so do a lot of other things about Pinterest, the startup world’s latest attempt at commercialising hipster culture, but that hasn’t stopped it from becoming the latest fad with women—which makes sense considering it’s modeled after real-life corkboards. Where’s the Bieber category? Anyway, here’s a list of my gripes with Pinterest:

The categories suck

In short, Pinterest’s categories are like Newspeak. Just as Orwell’s artificially-constrained language rigidly laid down what could be discussed by only having words for those subjects, Pinterest’s categories are equally useless. In fact they might as well not exist at all.

When you begin using Pinterest, one of the first things you’re prompted to do is create a new pin board, and part of that process is choosing a category. You can opt to pin things only to others’ boards, but that sort of misses the point. But really guys, how vague can these categories be? One of the categories is Film, Music and Books. That’s right. That’s a single category. Another is Art. Fucking really? Art? That’s a category? Or take Products. All products, one category.

Mind you, there are plenty of highly-specific categories too, like ‘Weddings and Events’, or ‘Print and Posters’. Why do fucking Weddings and Posters get their own categories, while everything from Lil John to Dostoyevsky gets put in Film, Music and Books?

The content model sucks

Categories aside, we all ‘love things’, so why not use Pinterest anyway? I love mopeds, web design, music and all sort of hobbies that could be pinned on Pinterest. But I don’t. What I do enjoy is reading a number of blogs and forums with members that post highly-detailed narratives about things they love. I could get lost in a 12-page, seven-month thread on Moped Army started by someone painstakingly customising a Puch Magnum and that would be really interesting. I’d develop a sense of connection to that person, and their project, because I took the time to read the thread. I might comment myself, or say hi to them at a rally. On /r/webdev someone might ask for help designing their personal site and commenters might debate the merits of Bootstrap or HTML5 Boilerplate. A real discussion! How novel.

Even on networks as inane as Twitter and Tumblr, the ultimate point is not just fervent ego indulgence, but actual interaction and discussion. It’s true that you can add your own comment to pins, and you can comment on others’ pins, but the site takes great pains to encourage you to keep such comments as short as possible. Yes, Twitter has constraints too. The difference is that with Twitter, tweets are the content. Sure, there are tweets that are just pictures, but it comprises a small fraction of all content in the system.

So why not compare Pinterest to real photo-sharing systems, like Flickr? Because Pinterest isn’t a photo-sharing system. Though it is possible to pin your own original photos on Pinterest, that’s not what the site mandates or even encourages. It’s simply a curation system. No new content gets created, just spread around.

Picture a world where all tweets are just imgur links, and you’ve got Pinterest.

Others came before, and did semantics better

If you’ve ever used Svpply, you probably know what I mean. Svpply is similar to Pinterest, but it focuses solely on products, and compels its users to attach semantic metadata to every item posted, like where to purchase the item, and for how much. It’s actually a pretty useful resource in a variety of situations. Trying to find a trendy gift? Want to find items that fit a certain color scheme? Looking for something at a certain price range? Svpply is great for that, because you can reasonably count on that item being an actual purchasable product. It’s possible to use Pinterest like that (investors laud Pinterest’s ability to channel traffic to product pages), but it’s not as convenient, since you have to sort through a bunch of other irrelevant bullshit first.

How about food, which is Pinterest’s most popular category by far? It’s great if you just want to look at a bunch of pictures of food. But Pinterest has no way to, say, attach a recipe—besides cramming it into a 500-character comment, of course. Otherwise, you’d better hope the source page contains a recipe. On sites dedicated to recipe-sharing (and there are a ton), this whole process works much better—recipes can be rated, they’re machine-readable and therefore can be run through advanced searches and automatically categorised, and you don’t have to skip past all the delicious-looking but ultimately useless stock photos.

When you compare Pinterest to similar kinds of sites, it becomes clear that it’s not that Pinterest users don’t create any new, original content, but rather that there isn’t enough meaningful information attached to the media that gets pinned. And since the taxonomy of that metadata depends highly on what gets pinned, the site’s general-purpose pinning system can never serve most types of users.

Simply pinning pictures gets so boring after a little while.

All told, I can’t really envision a long-term future for Pinterest unless the site’s re-worked, and as it currently stands, I don’t know how that can be done. I know plenty of friends with Pinterest accounts, but they don’t use them; they simply signed up because they got an invite. As the epic failure of Google Plus has shown, it’s important to nail down a working formula for your site before it finishes riding the ‘Wave’ of initial excitement and invite-driven signup frenzy.

But in theory we don’t really need better batteries than we already have. We sleep every 24 hours anyway, so charging mobile personal gadgets at night isn’t a problem. Electric cars already have a range of about 100 miles. Even short-term uninterruptable power supplies are affordable if you need it. The latest types of batteries we have are recyclable.

‘Wait, a minute,’ you say. ’100 miles in an electric car sucks! They’ll never catch on if we can’t drive a long distance!‘

With current gas prices, that’s true. So I guess the other half of my wishlist is, ‘and gasoline gets crazy expensive as fast as possible.’ At some point it’s inevitable that oil will become unaffordable. Now, with countries like India and China spiking in oil usage, we’ll see the end of affordable oil in our lifetime. The fact that we’re squabbling over whether to increase the country’s pipeline capacity by a mere 1% to extract meager amounts of oil from arctic tar sands probably signals that we’re in major trouble already—and after all, the average American spent $5500 in 2009 on driving, or $15 every day. It logically follows that anything we might possibly do to reduce driving expenses would have a major positive impact on our standard of living—imagine just having an extra free $15 every day! In two weeks that buys you a decent $200 bike…

…but I digress. The problem is not that gas won’t get expensive (we know that’ll happen). The problem is that if battery technology gets better and electric cars develop 500-mile ranges at super-low cost, then we’ll just keep building more idiotic sprawl and continue spending more time in the car than on vacation, only we’ll be driving electric. Woo hoo! Only we’ll still be fat as shit, our kids will still be miserably stuck in a McSuburb they can’t yet drive around themselves, we’ll still use more energy to heat and cool our houses, local businesses will still continue failing, the cost of low-density municipal utilities and road maintenance will still be a problem, we’ll keep destroying undeveloped wilderness, your downtown will look like a dead concrete shithole, and even if you’re poor you’ll still need to shell out thousands of dollars just to get to the store and back, and hopefully without getting stuck in traffic. Only you’ll be driving electric. Woo hoo!

You see how much of a relatively lame improvement electric cars are to the current situation? Sure, no more oil and pollution is great, but any way of driving cheaply is still driving cheaply, and enables all the bullshit that goes along with it.

Now let me tell you about how to go long distances in an electric vehicle without any batteries at all; it’s called rail. Whether it’s a streetcar or subway or commuter lines or intercity high-speed trains, there are no batteries needed. It can move people and freight quickly, reliably, safely, in all weather, at a fixed cost, with entirely domestic industry and labour, and it’s been proven to work for 200 years.

End result? Having rail as your primary transport option forces people to live more densely, in prosperous, beautiful, vibrant densities our cities enjoyed for thousands of years until the 20th century.

Sure, some of us will always have personal vehicles. But having shitty batteries gives us some awesome disincentives to drive: if your total range is 100 miles, then realistically you won’t want to venture more than about 40 miles away since you have to come back again too. Good luck commuting from Santa Monica to Santa Ana! Plus it takes a long time to charge your car, you have to remember to plug it in and unplug it every time you go anywhere (assuming there’s a charger at all!), and driving a lot wears out your expensive batteries faster. With all that to deal with, maybe, just maybe, you’ll end up saving the driving for the times it’s truly necessary, and being able to live in a community that facilitates it.

But, sadly, only if batteries don’t get better.

At the time I was searching for a nice balance of price, size, flexibility and image quality, so I ended up purchasing a Sony H1, a camera that still boasts relatively decent specifications considering its age: 5.1 MP, 36-432 mm EFL, f/2.8-3.7, optical image stabilisation, a 2.5″ LCD, and a total weight of 591 grams. Pretty ho-hum specifications by today’s standards, but quite impressive for 2005. Classified as a ‘prosumer superzoom’ it’s not the smallest, cheapest, or most powerful out there, but offers a nice balance of all of these; certainly when compared to an SLR, what it lacks in quality and flexibility is made up for by its size and price. When compared to a compact camera, what it lacks in size and price is made up for by its quality and flexibility. Woo!

Hot sexy MILCs

Now fast forward seven years, and this niche market has expanded into a crazy-ass array of mirrorless interchangeable lens compacts (MILCs), or what we used to just call ‘system cameras’. After the success of prosumer superzooms like my H1, manufacturers realised that the market for compact digital cameras was rapidly dwindling in the face of cameraphones. A few would make the jump to SLRs—which are more popular and affordable than ever before. Most wouldn’t though, and for those folks a new class of camera had to be marketed that avoided the bulk of SLRs without compromising too much on quality. The flaw with my H1 is that despite its flexibility, the sensor is still pretty damn small.

These days, for much less than $500 (the original price of the H1!) you can now buy Micro Four-Thirds cameras with a lens included. MFT sensors are somewhat smaller than the APS-size sensors in low-end and midrange SLRs, but gigantic compared to one in most compact point-and-shoots. The Olympus PEN E-PL1 goes on Amazon for an incredibly low $279 right now—and that includes Olympus’s 14-42 mm (28-84 mm EFL) f/3.5-5.6 lens, which in terms of focal length and aperture isn’t too far off from a kit lens on a $700 SLR. With the extra cash you could even pick up Panasonic’s kickass 20mm f/1.7 pancake lens. Granted, with an MFT camera you sacrifice certain features, like an optical viewfinder, phase-detection autofocus, and that satisfyingly loud shutter. But, for me, the price seems right, the sensor’s big enough, and (as the title of this article makes clear) I’m looking to heed the ‘the best camera is the one you have with you’ rule.

X, X, X

There are a number of other MILC formats besides MFT, of course, like NX from Samsung, NEX from Sony, CX from Nikon, the Pentax Q, etc. Many of these I’m going to rule out right away because of terrible sensors (the Pentax Q is 1/2.3″), awful lens options (there are only four Nikon CX lenses, only one is a prime, and that prime’s max aperture is f/2.8), or limited camera selection (there are only three current Sony NEX cameras).

Of course, there’s also the ‘the best lens is the one you have with you’ rule as well, which makes non-interchangeable big-sensor compacts like the Fujifilm X10 look tempting as an alternative to an MFT. Its lens is fast at f/2 to 2.8, yet it also zooms from 28-112 mm EFL. To get that kind of flexibility from any Micro Four Thirds camera you’d have to carry around at least two or three lenses; no MFT zoom lens out right now is faster than f/3.5. Fortunately there are more than a dozen MFT prime lenses. Micro Four Thirds has a leg up in terms of selection because the format is shared between Panasonic and Olympus.

Two brands, one format

Let me bitch about Olympus for a minute.

I’ve never liked Olympus, especially because of their nonsensical xD memory card format and their quick abandonment of the full-size Four Thirds standard; the most recent Four Thirds camera, the Olympus E-5, is from 2010. Discontinuing a format after just seven years is quite the shitty move to pull on all your customers who invested in Four Thirds. Nikon’s F-mount dates from 1959 and is still used on every Nikon SLR today; I could safely purchase a Nikon DX camera today and not only have 50 years of lenses to use, but probably another few decades’ more to come.

We’re only about three and a half years into Micro Four Thirds’ run; who’s to say they won’t pull the same shit again, and abandon MFT in three or four years?

Panasonic scores a lot higher in my mind. They developed the Lumix LX3 and LX5, which were well-built, were supremely portable at under 300g, and gave you Leica glass for under $500. Their appeal to amateur photographers paved the way for Fujifilm to develop the X10 and X100.

But at the end of the day, Panasonic’s MFT cameras tend to be considerably more expensive than Olympus ones, plus they don’t offer in-camera image stabilisation, which means no stabilisation at all if you use an Olympus lens with a Panasonic body.

Right now it looks like a tie between the E-PL1 and the X10…

We’re public media, which tends to attract older, more affluent users. But, we’re also in a college town, which tends to attract younger, politically progressive users. On the other hand, we’re in southern Indiana, so that means we also have our share of less affluent users, and also more politically conservative users. Our programming ranges from classical music to science education, and we cover topics ranging from local transportation to global food issues. There really is no stereotypical ‘midwest public media user.’

Which is why it’s so very interesting to look at what browsers people use with the site.

A bit of history

If you’re reading this you probably know that Internet Explorer has long enjoyed a dominant and nigh-invincible position in the browser market. For years after alternatives like Firefox and Safari became available, the majority of users still clung to IE. The situation began to change after October 2006, when Mozilla Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7 were released just a couple of weeks apart. Mozilla’s campaign to switch to Firefox was in full swing, while reviews of Internet Explorer 7 were mostly negative, citing the browser’s cluttered UI, mediocre security improvements, and lackluster support for new web standards. Eventually, IE market share began to drop to about 60% over the next several years. Then four interesting things happened, all at the same time.

First, after a couple of years on the market, modern smartphones running iOS and Android matured, and by spring 2010 were selling like mad—and none of them ran IE or Firefox. At the same time, after a couple years of beta testing and development, Google released a stable version of Chrome that ran on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Third, Apple introduced the iPad, a tablet with Safari as the default browser. Finally, due to the success of the iPod and iPhone, Macs began to sell in unprecedented numbers, all with Safari as the default browser.

Apart from happening at the same time, what do these four events all have in common? Safari, Android Browser, and Chrome are all based on the same rendering engine, WebKit. From the perspective of a web developer like me, they’re almost the same browser.

In October 2010, about 40% of indianapublicmedia.org users were on some version of Explorer. Mozilla trailed at 30%, and WebKit took last place at 27%. Even by this point, IE was pining for the fjords, and WebKit had nearly as many users as Mozilla. Mobile traffic (as a percentage of total site traffic) hovered around 5%.

After that point, driven by Chrome, Macs, smartphones, and the iPad, WebKit’s share increased dramatically, and Explorer and Mozilla began a precipitous decline:

Holy shit, right? At 44.19%, WebKit now accounts for nearly the total share of Explorer and Firefox combined. If you had asked me nine years ago (when Safari 1.0, the first mainstream WebKit browser was released) if WebKit would be by far the most popular rendering engine in less than ten years, I would have said, ‘maybe if one of the existing juggernauts switched rendering engines.’ As it turns out, that didn’t even have to happen.

But crazier still might be the incredible explosion of mobile traffic that’s happened over the past year. Even just a year ago, mobile traffic had inched its way to barely 7% of total site traffic. Now it’s at nearly 20%.

Why? Well, mobile browsing is just plain easier now. Screens are getting higher-res. Processors are getting faster. Just about every major web video player can offer an HTML5 player and h.264 video to mobile devices. And of course, the iPad is immensely popular across multiple demographics: older, less-savvy users are buying them in droves because they’re so simple to use. Young people love them for their portability and cutting-edge apps. Higher-income people buy them as an addition to their laptop and desktop computers. Lower-income people buy them because they work adequately as a standalone personal computer and at half the price of Apple’s least-expensive Macbook they’re a (relatively) inexpensive way to be a part of the Apple ecosystem.

This widespread appeal probably explains why the iPad alone accounted for 3.3% of all traffic to the site. All Android phones combined accounted for another 5.7% of total traffic. iPhones were another 7.7%. Since virtually all of these devices are running WebKit browsers, they bolster WebKit’s numbers immensely. In fact, if you took away all mobile traffic (which for simplicity’s sake I’m assuming is all WebKit—BlackBerry and Windows Phone combined accounted for less than 1% of all traffic), WebKit’s market share would be 25.91% instead of 44.19%. Clearly, WebKit owes much of its current success to its near-universal presence on mobile devices.

What can we learn

Mozilla made a huge mistake in not working on a mobile version of Firefox early enough. Even now, there’s no iOS version, extensions for the desktop version don’t work without (sometimes significant) modification, and in general it feels like an unfinished product compared to WebKit browsers for Android.

Microsoft made a huge mistake in not working on a modern mobile operating system early enough. This is frequently discussed in the contexts of mobile app and content ecosystems, etc, but since Internet Explorer Mobile isn’t available for any other platforms except Windows Phone, it’s also caused IE Mobile usage to drop off a cliff.

With three different first-class rendering engines in healthy competition, for the most part we’re living in a browser renaissance. Internet Explorer is remarkably better than it was a couple of versions ago thanks to competition from Mozilla and WebKit…but so are Mozilla and WebKit. Javascript is faster, browsers are more stable, UIs are better, and there’s a world of extensions out there for development, blocking ads, social media integration, and much more.

Plugins are essentially dead. WebKit led the way in supporting cutting-edge CSS3 and HTML5 features that make plugins like Flash Player, Silverlight, and Java obsolete. iOS has never supported plugins. Barely any Android devices do. Microsoft recently announced that Internet Explorer 10, when run in the Metro interface, would not support plugins—even on desktop computers.

Almost no one cares to install a different browser on their mobile device, and if they do, it’s probably still a WebKit browser. I have several friends with Android phones and they sometimes run alternative browsers like Dolphin, but this is just a slightly different UI to the same rendering engine. The reason for this is probably that mobile screen real estate is so expensive that mobile browsers tend to have a very minimal UI in the first place. If you strip a browser UI down to just a URI and/or search bar, a couple buttons, and the document view, then it’s pretty hard to really differentiate your browser with a different UI. How much can you really do, anyway? Microsoft puts the URI bar of Internet Explorer 9 Mobile at the bottom of the screen rather than at the top, a typical Microsoft arbitrary design decision that reminds me of putting window controls on the right instead of on the left, or desktop icons on the left instead of the right. Is this the kind of feature that makes users willing to switch? Of course not.

Is this good?

In the end, though any web developer can appreciate more users running Chrome instead of IE6, I do wonder if WebKit in 2012 will become analogous to IE in 2002. Thankfully WebKit is entirely open source—a major difference from IE—but it’s still a monoculture that could lead to slower innovation in the future if its 99% mobile market share remains unchallenged.

After all, as a web developer, I’m less likely to start supporting a new web platform feature of a browser with only minuscule market share, unless that feature becomes adopted by The Monoculture as well. Would SPDY have received the same attention if it had developed by Microsoft for IE Mobile, instead of by Google for WebKit? This example speaks both to open source advantage of WebKit (SPDY was subsequently adopted by Amazon for the Kindle Fire), and the potential disadvantage of its monoculture, since other HTTP successors have been dreamt up in the past but never went anywhere, like HTTP-MPLEX, Waka, and CoopNet, since they didn’t have the backing of a major browser vendor. This is a very real-life example of innovation-at-the-pace-of-The-Monoculture and it applies as much to WebKit as it did to Internet Explorer a decade ago.

With the imminent arrival Windows 8 and forthcoming Android tablets (which, running Ice Cream Sandwich, will hopefully be competitive with the iPad), there’s great potential for the browser market to be upended yet again, and for Mozilla and Microsoft to make new inroads into mobile browser market share. For now, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Fast forward a few days and others have written Chrome and Firefox extensions to do so, which then received coverage on some big sites like Gawker, and the extensions have now been downloaded thousands of times. Neat!

Only trouble is, I mistakenly put in nationalgeographic.com in the list in addition to natgeotv.com, although the former is a non-profit and only the latter is a property of News Corp. The worst part is that the list’s now been re-posted by countless other blogs instead of linked back to the Reddit post (where I’ve made the correction). I contacted the authors of various Murdoch-blocking extensions, but I should’ve been a bit more careful in researching exactly what domains to put on the list.

Sorry about that, National Geographic.

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The irony.  It burns.

<?php wp_oembed_add_provider( 'http://video.pbs.org/video/*', 'http://video.pbs.org/oembed/' ); ?>

The easiest way to do this is just stick it in your theme’s functions.php file. Let’s try it out:

The new font used is called Fontin Sans. It really is quite nice for both a body and headline font, I think.