Football/soccer in nine languages

My Floatingsheep colleagues and I just finished a test search in Google using nine different languages. You can see some of our initial results in the map below. The map visualises which of these various ways of referring to football are most visible at any particular location in the Google Maps database.
The subject matter (football) is a fascinating case-study, but we'll be experimenting with more words in more languages in the coming weeks and months. Click over to Floatingsheep for the full post.

World Bank Frees up Development Data

The World Bank is now offering free access to an enormous collection of development statistics! The measures of ICT use and access are particularly interesting. Looking forward to delving into these statistics over the next few weeks.

Here is the World Bank president speaking about the initiative:

Mapping Wikipedia over space and time

Just published a series of seven maps over at Floatingsheep about the geographies of Wikipedia biographies over time. Below are two examples, but head over there for the full series.

Pre-16th Century Wikipedia Biographies

21st Century Wikipedia Biographies

Volcano network effects in Kenya

While sitting stranded in Washington feeling somewhat sorry for myself about not being able to get home to England, I read the following article in the Guardian:

Iceland volcano: Kenya's farmers losing $1.3m a day in flights chaos

A volcano in Iceland harming Kenyan farmers! The article obviously puts my own grumbles into perspective, but is also a fascinating insight into the highly complex relationships that underpin many of our social and economic interactions: relationships that only really become visible when integral parts of the networked systems that we rely on fail.