something in the way

Kiva, the microfinance site, lets you give small loans to people around the world to help them get their small business up and running. This animated map shows how 620,000 funded 615,000 borrowers, from the start of Kiva in 2005 up until now. Watch in full-screen for maximum effect.

Colors indicate loan type, which confused me at first, because I thought the map was saying that specific loan types were only given out during each time of year. It's actually cycling through the loan types though, so you can see the breakdowns as the animation plays through, and then it shows all loans at once at the end of each year.

The only thing that's missing are some counters for the amount of money passing hands. It's been an impressive $240 million in loans around the world with a repayment rate of almost 99 percent.

[Thanks, Andy]

Google Map Maker is a simple tool that lets you draw your own map and share that map with others. The Pulse view lets you see how people are making use of that tool in real-time. On top is the Google Earth view. On the bottom is a zoomed in view of the actual edit. Just press play, and see how people around the world are using Map Maker.

It's a simple map that is of the same likeness as the Zappos sales map and the even older Twittervision, but somehow it's still fun to peek in to see what people are doing.

[Google Map Maker via @johnmaeda]

Paul Bourke, a research professor at the University of Western Australia, provides us a fly-through of the known universe, according to the 6dF Galaxy Survey:

The 6dF Galaxy Survey has collected more than 120,000 redshifts over the southern sky over a 5 year period from 2001 to 2005. Its goal is to map our southern view of the local universe, and use the peculiar motions of one-tenth of the survey to measure galaxy mass. It covers more than eight times the sky area of the successful 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey.

Watch the animation in all its glory below as it moves to the edge of the data.

[6df Galaxy Survey via Brain Pickings]

A few months ago there was a lot of hoopla around the iPhone and the recording of your location. Crowdflow wants to take advantage of this opportunity to build an open database of location traces that people can use for research. Using their existing data so far, from 880 phones, Michael Kreil of Crowdflow mapped people moving around in Europe (in Germany for the most part). The results are beautiful.

The movements have a lovely firefly aesthetic as people, or I guess phones, move about the area. City centers of course glow brighter, and areas pulsate as night time comes and then becomes bright again in the morning.

Watch the animation play out in the videos below. The two are the same data, but with different color schemes. Increase size and resolutions for maximum effect. All it needs is some music for ultimate sexy.

[Crowdflow via infosthetics]

Do you understand how time zones work around the world and when exactly you need to move your watch forward or back? Me neither. BBC News provides a brief history of time zones via interactive globe.

Theoretically, the world should be divide into 24 equal time zones, in which each zone differs from the last by one hour. But as the years have passed, the world has turned into a much more complicated place. Time zones are now much more irregular and sometimes seem positively eccentric, affected as they are by political, geographical and social changes in the real world.

Rotate the globe to see where each time zone lands. Some of the zones seem relatively straight, but even in some areas like the GMT-2 time zone, there's some crookedness. There must be some small islands there or something. It's either that or the Royal Observatory is fond of puzzles. No, there aren't any other options.

[BBC News via @kelsosCorner]

Firefox 4 came out of beta today and is now available for download. As of writing this, there have been about 2.2 million downloads worldwide, and you can watch the action in real-time. Little bits of fairy dusts shimmering worldwide with a counter up top and an hourly time series chart on the bottom.

The new browser boasts faster browsing, a new way of organizing your tabs, and plenty of other updates. Will it be enough to bring former Firefox users who switched to Chrome? I just closed Chrome, and am writing this in Firefox. We'll see how this goes.

[Mozilla | Thanks, @juaniux]

In this series of interactive cartograms, FedEx shows our changing world (and I guess, how they are changing with it) through a variety of worldwide demographics such as access to mobile Web, growth, and happiness. Above is the cartogram for richest countries i.e. GDP. Choose a topic, press play, and the cartogram changes accordingly to match the current metric.

In case you're unfamiliar with cartograms, they're the same idea as choropleth maps, but instead of using color to represent a metric, the country areas are used. A caveat of choropleth maps is that large geographic areas inevitably end up looking more prominent even if their value is lower than that of a smaller country. A cartogram on the other hand will make even a smaller country more prominent if it has a higher value for whatever metric. The caveat with cartograms of course is that you can easily end up with a big blob.

For example, here's the cartogram for high-technology exports. Looking kind of blobby in Europe.

Have a look for yourself. There are quite a few other topics to click through.

[FedEx]

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As we all know, people all over the world use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family. You meet someone. You friend him or her on Facebook to keep in touch. These friendships began within universities, but today there are friendships that connect countries. Facebook engineering intern Paul Butler visualizes these connections:

I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. I used a color ramp from black to blue to white, with each line's color depending on its weight. I also transformed some of the lines to wrap around the image, rather than spanning more than halfway around the world.

In other words, for each pair of countries with a friend in one country and a friend in the other, a line was drawn. The more friends and distance between two countries, the brighter the lines on a black-blue-white color scale. The "stronger" connections were drawn on top, so they are more visually prominent.

It might remind you of Chris Harrison's maps that show interconnectedness via router configurations.

In areas of high density it looks more or less like population density. Or even more interesting, you can compare the above section to Ben Fry's All Streets, which maps all the roads in the United States. Physical connections look a lot like digital connections.

Most interesting though, I think, are not the places that are lit up, but the relatively dark ones, where Facebook has yet to reach. There are still huge sections of complete black:

Check out the high-resolution version and more details on the process here. One interesting note for the R fanboys. This was done in your favorite open-source stat software for computing and graphics.

[Facebook via ReadWriteWeb]

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Google recaps search trends for the year in Google Zeitgeist 2010, from the World Cup and the Olympics to the earthquake in Haiti and the BP oil spill. Above is relative search volumes around the world during the ash cloud in Iceland. You can browse the interactive map, or use the timeline to watch changes over significant events during the year.

A video (below) also accompanies the interactive, showing how the physical world and digital are melding ever so nicely.

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We tend to see the world in different ways, depending on what part of the world we live in. If you've never been to California, you probably associate it with Hollywood and surfers. If you've never been to the midwest, you think corn and potatoes. Of course, these regions have much more going for them and are a far more varied. Still, the stereotypes are amusing. I couldn't help but chuckle when an old roommate came from Washington to Los Angeles and thought he was going to see movie stars on every block. Boy, was he surprised. It was only every other block.

Graphic designer Yanko Tsvetkov takes such notions of Europe in his series of stereotype maps, which themselves are stereotypes of stereotypes. The above is how the US sees Europe.

Here's Europe according to Britain.

And Europe according to Germany.

[alphadesigner | Thanks, Chris]