Craig Trim, a great friend and colleague of mine at IBM, pointed me at the two superb visualisations below. They can be found diretly here and Ill let the text from that blog speak for itself:
Have you ever wondered where the readers of The New York Times’s Web
site come from, and what kind of devices they use to read our content? In a
past life, not too long ago, when I worked in The Times’s research and
development labs, we started a research visualization project to explore this
very topic. I worked on these visualizations with Michael Young, Michael Kramer,
and Noriaki Okada.
The two videos below show the traffic to NYTimes.com on June 25, 2009, the
day Michael Jackson died. The 24-hour period is compressed into a little over
a minute and a half.
The top video represents readers coming to the Web site from the United
States. The second video shows a map of our global readers. The circles indicate
two things. First, the yellow circles represent readers coming to the main Web
site from desktop or laptop computers, and the orange circles indicate readers
using mobile phones to access our mobile site. Second, the size of the circles
represents the number of readers at that moment in time. You can see the corresponding time stamp in the upper left corner of the videos.
Just watching these maps glow can be a mesmerizing experience, but there’s
another fascinating piece of data within this particular day. At about 1 minutes
10 seconds into the video, at 5:20 p.m., you can see a huge pulse of readers
coming to the Web site, both from mobile devices and personal computers. This
huge traffic bump happened after TMZ.com broke the news of Mr. Jackson’s
death. As the news started to filter across the Internet, traffic continued
to ebb and flow throughout the evening.
It’s also intriguing to see the heartbeat of reader visits throughout
any particular day. You can see more mobile traffic in the mornings and afternoons,
as readers commute to and from work, and a large pulse of readers coming to
the site around lunchtime.
New York Times U.S. Traffic Data — Mobile and Web
The New York Times site traffic, US, June 25, 2009 from Nick Bilton on Vimeo.
New York Times World Traffic Data — Mobile and Web
The New York Times site traffic, World View, June 25, 2009 from Nick Bilton on Vimeo.
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