And what many bloggers don’t realize is that information they put on their blogs can have a direct legal impact.

Even if what you’re posting to your blog isn’t breaking any laws, it may be considered unethical by others, which can often be just as damaging.

Here’s a guide to free speech and freedom of information specifically for bloggers. Legal issues, ethical issues, and other things to consider are all covered.

If you have additional input or advice, or disagree with anything here, please speak up in the comments.

Permanent Records

Do you remember the stories about a “permanent record” that were told to frighten children into behaving appropriately throughout school?

The concept was popularized on television and in movies, with kids constantly being threatened that a particular action was going to be placed on their “permanent record”.

The theory was that this record would follow you through school and then eventually into the workforce, and that negative things it contained could effect your entire life. In reality (in most countries, at least), there’s no such thing as a “permanent record”, at least not in the sense that it was portrayed.

But with the Internet, there is a permanent record. Records are kept of virtually everything you do online, often automatically as part of backups and caches, though sometimes it might also be done manually if something particularly funny or embarrassing or incriminating is done.

This permanent record can come back to haunt you in the future, depending on what it contains, and can really interfere with your ability to get a job, get into a good college, or run for political office.

The thing to remember, is that once you put something out there online, it’s out there forever. You won’t get a do-over if it’s something you’re no longer proud of.

While for the average person this is unlikely to ever cause any substantial problems, if you’re a businessperson or future politician, it can be very damaging.

Consider your aspirations and future ambitions and act accordingly now. Don’t put things online that you think you might regret later. Chances are, you probably will regret them at some point.

Libel and Slander

Libel is when you write something untrue and potentially harmful about someone. Slander is when you say something untrue and potentially harmful about someone.

Laws vary from country to country on how slander and libel (collectively called “defamation”) is handled.

In some countries (such as the U.S.), defamation is a civil matter and is dealt with only if the victim sues the defamer. In most other countries (including Canada, the UK, Australia, Russia, and China) though, there are criminal laws against defamation, at least in certain circumstances.

For the most part, if something you’ve said or written is true, and you can prove that it’s true, you’ll be protected from libel or slander suits.

That doesn’t mean that you still won’t have to defend against them, which can be expensive. You can still run into issues if the information you’ve disclosed isn’t of public interest.

If the information you’ve disclosed publically is considered private information and not of public note, then you can be sued under invasion of privacy laws in some cases.

Privacy

Privacy laws are another thing that vary widely from country to country.

As a general rule, though, unless something is of public importance, if it’s not something someone would likely want shared, don’t share it.

Now, “public importance” is one of those things that’s open to a lot of interpretation. Obviously, if you’re exposing information about a public figure, then there’s a good chance a lot more falls into the “public importance” category.

If it’s someone who isn’t a public figure, then there are fewer areas that would be important to the general public, and therefore fewer things you can expose without having serious worries about being sued or violating any laws.

A good rule of thumb is that if you wouldn’t want someone to expose a particular fact about you, don’t expose it about them without a very good reason for doing so.

Intellectual Property

Intellectual property generally includes copyrights, patents, and trademarks.

In the United States and many other countries, as soon as a work (whether written, audio, or another format covered by the law) is created, it is protected by copyright law.

No registration is required to be protected, though registration does add an extra layer of protection (mainly a specific date when it can be proven that a work existed).

Trademarks and patents, however, do have to go through a registration and approval process in order to be protected.

As a blogger or online content creator, you need to respect the intellectual property rights of others. This is usually relatively easy to do. Here are some things to keep in mind when using the work of others within your own blog:

• Don’t quote more than a few sentences of someone else’s content.
• Properly cite any content you include and link to the original source.
• It’s also polite to link to the place where you found content, if it’s not the original source.
• Don’t use images in your blog posts unless they’re licensed for use (through Creative Commons or otherwise) or you have permission.
• When you use images, make sure you link back to the source and properly credit the creator.
• When doing roundups or posts that are showcasing artists’ work, it’s generally not necessary to ask permission to post small versions of their work with proper credit and links, though you should be prepared to take down the post or the part of the post that features them if they object.
• If you use a trademarked name in your posts, you may want to include a note about who the trademark belongs to and/or link back to the company’s website. If you don’t, you might even get a letter from the trademark owner requesting that you do so.

An interesting side-note about trademarks: trademarks are always adjectives.

Using a trademark as a verb or even as a noun is technically a violation of trademark law, at least in the United States. In other words, if you say you “Googled” something or you “Photoshopped” something, that’s a trademark violation.

The trademarks there are technically the Google search engine, and Adobe Photoshop software.

The problem that companies run into is that if they don’t protect their trademarks from use like this, the trademark can become “genericized” and they can lose their trademark rights to it, meaning anyone could then use the name.

Censorship

When we think of Internet censorship, many people generally think of Iran or China and their massive censorship efforts.

But what most people don’t realize is that a majority of countries worldwide actually employ some form of Internet censorship or surveillance.

Blue countries have no censorship, yellow countries have some, red countries are under surveillance, and black countries are heavily censored.

Among the countries that employ at least some censorship is the United States, the United Kingdom, Bahrain, Yemen, Australia, Syria, Germany, Denmark, Canada, and Brazil.

These censorship laws are varied, with some specifically set up to protect minors from content that would be illegal for them to see elsewhere, while others aim to block citizens from seeing anything that’s considered offensive, immoral, or dangerous by their government.

Many people will agree that some censorship laws are necessary. Laws that protect minors (from things like obscene or pornographic content), for example, are often met with popular support in many countries.

Sometimes these laws only extend to public schools or other government-run institutions, rather than for the populace at large.

Other censorship laws, though, especially those that hinder with freedom of speech, are often met with public disapproval and can cause a country to be ostracized by others in the world community (as is the case with China and Iran).

Censorship plays an important role in what you say online in two separate ways. First, if you live in a country with censorship laws, educate yourself on what those laws permit and do not permit.

Then decide if you can abide by those rules or not. If not, and you’re willing to break your country’s laws, there are often workarounds possible, such as hosting your site outside of your home country or having someone else register your domain and host your site elsewhere. But realize that you may face legal repercussions by doing this, some of which can be very severe.

The other important role censorship plays in online content is if you’re trying to reach people within a particular country.

If your blog’s content is of particular interest to those in, say, China, then you’ll need to make sure your blog doesn’t say anything that violates China’s censorship policies.

Web Host Rules

Above we talked about government censorship. But there’s another type of censorship that takes place regularly, as well. It’s censorship by your web host or ISP.

Hosting companies sometimes have strict rules about what they’ll allow to be hosted on their servers and what they won’t. The usual targets of these rules are pornography, obscene content, or content that could potentially be used for illegal acts (such as excerpts from books like the Anarchist’s Cookbook).

For the most part, these ISP and web host rules aren’t something you can fight against. In most of the world, web hosts are private businesses, and have the right to run their businesses in whatever manner they deem appropriate. If they don’t want to host a particular type of site, that’s their prerogative.

The best advice I can offer in those situations is to find a web host that has no problem hosting the type of material you want to publish.

Censoring Your Own Blog

There’s also the question of whether you should censor your own blog.

When visitors leave comments on your posts, you may decide you want to censor them or not post them at all. This is particularly applicable if the comment is offensive or inflammatory, or if it adds nothing to the conversation.

If you do decide to censor comments on your blog, it’s generally a good idea to post a public comment moderation policy somewhere. This should outline what types of comments will be excluded from publication (whether this is simply limited to posts that are offensive or extends to those that add nothing to the conversation).

A public comment policy lends credibility and can lead to improved quality in the comments you do receive.

Just realize that some feel that moderating comments in this manner is a hindrance to freedom of speech and may react unfavorably.

You may also censor what you write, in terms of the posts you publish. When you decide not to write about a specific topic due to potential negative reactions and repurcussions, that’s self-censorship. Most bloggers self-censor to some extent on a regular basis.

Personal vs. Business Blogging

When considering what information to post on your blog, it’s important to consider whether you’re blogging for personal or business purposes. What one might consider perfectly appropriate on an informal, personal blog could be offensive or unprofessional if you’re blogging for your business.

This is one of those situations where it’s important to figure out the repercussions of everything you post online.

If your blog is for your company or for your profession, then you need to consider very carefuly what you post. And not just from a legal standpoint. You need to consider that everything you say is going to reflect on you as a professional.

On a personal blog, people generally expect you to be more informal, more casual, and less professional. But remember that anything you post online may be seen by potential clients or employers in the future. Just because it’s a personal site doesn’t mean it won’t be used against you professionally.

Legal vs. Ethical Issues

When considering what to publish on your blog or elsewhere online, it’s a good idea to consider ethical issues as well as legal issues.

There are some things you may debate posting that, while not illegal, may have ethical implications. These include things like off-the-record information shared in confidence or maliciously-obtained information.

While these things may not be specifically illegal, they would definitely be of questionable ethical standards.

One of the main reasons to consider ethical implications is your reputation. If your readers perceive you as unethical, they may also perceive you as untrustworthy and unreliable.

Unethical decisions may also result in problems with others in your industry or niche. They may blacklist your content or your blog entirely, which can really hurt your traffic numbers, especially in niches where blogs tend to quote each other a lot and send traffic back and forth.

When it comes to online content creation, your reputation is often the only thing that matters. And often people aren’t given a second chance if they make a blunder.

It’s important to consider what the content you’re publishing says about you, and that the message it’s putting out is the one you want.

Conclusion

For the most part, free speech seems to be the rule rather than the exception in the blogosphere.

Despite censoring, both by bloggers themselves, governments, and ISPs, most blogs are relatively open when it comes to the information they disseminate. This results in a blogosphere that has a diverse array of opinions and voices.

Just remember that everything you put out there becomes a part of the permanent cultural record.

What you say today could come back to haunt you (or help you) five, ten, or even twenty years in the future. Be sure that the message you’re putting out there now will be a message you’ll be still okay with then.

Written exclusively for WDD by Cameron Chapman.

Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer, and I’ve never played one on TV. To that end, the advice below should not be construed as legal advice, simply as sage words from one blogger to another. Also, as laws vary widely from country to country, you should always contact a legal expert in your own jurisdiction if you have any questions.

What are your views on censorship and how it should be handled? Please share your opinion below…

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The same could be said of intelligence. What they don’t tell you is that the “smart” people of the world are, in most cases, just better at researching and learning things than everyone else.

But researching is a learned skill, not something you’re born with.

And while some people might be predisposed to learn things more easily than others, it’s generally not enough to make a measurable difference.

By learning how to research, you can quickly and fairly easily become knowledgeable about just about anything. And with the Internet, almost anything you could ever want to know is at your fingertips. You just have to learn how to access it.

It’s all there, online, for free. Here are the techniques I’ve used to find pretty much anything online.

Start with Wikipedia

Whenever you try to learn something new on the Internet, start with Wikipedia. A wealth of information is there, covering practically every subject in an easy-to-use, easy-to-understand format.

The main reason to start with Wikipedia is that it gives a good overview of most topics.

Sure, any given page is bound to have some inaccuracies (as is the case on most user-generated websites), but most of the content is generally reliable. And when the accuracy of certain information is questionable, it’s usually tagged as such.

The key to using Wikipedia as a source, though, is in how you make use of the information. You have to pay attention to a number of things on a Wikipedia page aside from the main content.

First of all, read the introduction to the page. This is where you’ll usually find a quick description of the topic, along with alternate and related terms.

Skim the content to find the parts of the article that you need to know about most. Some articles are short and don’t have a list of contents. Others are several thousand words long. Reading the entire thing is usually unnecessary. Just skip to the sections that are relevant to you.

Next, check the references and related resources. The references is a great place to get in-depth information on your topic. These links often include scholarly journals and articles and other respected sources.

The related sources section includes external links to in-depth information. These websites often include professional associations and organizations devoted to the topic as well as general websites with good topical information.

Move on to Google

Once you’ve built a good foundation through Wikipedia, move on to a Google search (or whatever search engine you prefer).

Having read a bit on Wikipedia, you should know the main terms and keywords associated with the subject you’re researching. Start your general search with these terms.

When researching something, I always open a new window in Firefox. For each link I visit in a Google search, I open a new tab so that I can keep my original search results page open.

And if I click on additional links on pages that I have opened, I don’t have to go back through 10 or more pages to return to my original search.

Go Multimedia

Text isn’t the only educational content on the web. Video, podcasts and slideshows are out there to explain pretty much anything you can imagine.

The advantage of so much multimedia content being available is that it caters to people with different learning styles.

Some people learn well by reading. Others learn better by hearing an explanation or seeing a demonstration. And still others learn by doing (which is where step-by-step tutorials—either video, audio or text—come in handy).

If you learn best by watching demonstrations, then head on over to YouTube, Odeo, Vimeo or any of the many other video websites and start typing the keywords that you found on Wikipedia.

Make sure, though, whenever you deal with user-generated content to verify the information against reputable sources.

One often-overlooked resource for videos is the archive from the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conferences.

TED videos are available for free on the official website and cover (as you might expect) technology, entertainment and design.

While many of the videos focus on broad concepts rather than the nitty-gritty, they’re still a great resource to expand your horizon. And the lectures are given by leaders in their fields, so the information is generally reliable.

Check Out Free Educational Resources

A ton of colleges are now putting their course materials online, accessible for free.

MIT offers its entire catalog as open courseware, with lecture notes, resources and syllabi. Other two- and four-year colleges are following suit.

You’ll also find purely web-based open education initiatives that cover subjects you might not find at a traditional college. These free courses offer a ton of organized information on any given subject.

Some colleges offer their lectures in audio and video format. Princeton, for example, offers some of its lectures through iTunes, as does the University of Virginia, Duke, Emory, Yale and Stanford.

In fact, iTunes has an entire section devoted to educational podcasts called iTunes U. Non-educational organizations are also represented, including the Library of Congress and Wall Street Journal.

The educational podcast market isn’t monopolized by iTunes, though. Odeo has an education category with 466 channels and more than 67,000 episodes. Participating colleges and universities include Oxford University, the University of Melbourne and MIT.

Look for Tutorials

Depending on your topic, you may be able to find tutorials. For pretty much any practical skill (and a whole lot of unpractical ones), you can find an online tutorial that teaches you how to do it.

You can find tutorials through search engines (just add “tutorial” or “instructions” to the end of your keyword search). You can also find them on these websites:

Instructables is a general tutorial website that offers step-by-step instructions on projects in categories such as arts, crafts, food, kids, music, outdoors and pets. Every tutorial has photos and/or diagrams to illustrate the process.

eHow offers categorized instructions and tutorials created by users. They include both text and video tutorials on a variety of topics, including law, health, food and drink, electronics and computers.

WikiHow is a user-editable how-to manual that covers a ton of different topics. Because of its wiki format, tutorials and instructions are constantly being improved.

The Tuts+ Network offers tutorials on a variety of tech topics, including Photoshop, web design, Flash and photography. Its tutorials are split into separate blogs based on topic and are written by experts.

Tutorialized offers tech tutorials for a variety of software programs, including Photoshop, GIMP, Flash, Blender and Illustrator.

Good-Tutorials offers up tech-related tutorials, covering CSS, Flash, HTML, Photoshop, PHP and more. Tutorials are categorized and searchable.

Use Tools Available to You

A ton of tools are out there to make online research a bit (or a lot) easier.

Some help by organizing your sources, others let you save snippets of pages for later reference, and others do pretty much everything you could ask for from a research app. They make tracking your research and organizing it for later reference a much easier process.

Zotero is a Firefox add-on that acts like a research assistant. It lets you collect links and whole pages, organize them into folders and tag them. It even generates a “Works cited” list from them. You can jot down notes on anything you save, which makes it much easier to remember why you included it in the first place or to remind yourself later how you ended up using it.

Zotero has a ton of features. It automatically captures citations; it cites from within MS Word and OpenOffice; it accesses your library from anywhere; it searches PDFs and notes instantly; and it lets you create group libraries.

It’s also compatible with thousands of bibliographic styles, so when it comes time to create a “Works cited” list, you don’t have to spend hours reformatting the whole thing. The best part is that Zotero is free and open source, so you can extend and modify it to meet your needs (or find others who have already done the work).

Wired-Marker is a permanent highlighting tool for Firefox. You can highlight sections of a web page to refer to later on. It’s a great app if you want to be able to easily refer to a specific section of a website that you’ve bookmarked. Wired-Marker is itself also a bookmark organizer.

iCyte is a note-taking and bookmarking app that works with Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 and 8. It saves any pages that you highlight or bookmark, so that even if the page changes or is deleted, you still have the original version. You can save sections of a website or the whole thing. You can also invite others to join your projects, share information and access information that others have shared.

Similar Web is a great Firefox extension for finding websites related to the one you’re on. There’s also a web-based version for people who don’t use Firefox. The add-on is particularly useful if you’re on, say, Odeo and want to see other websites that offer podcasts.

Notefish is an online note-taking app that lets you custom-save content from any pages on the web. You can organize and share pages based on a specific subject. The app has many customizable features, including ones that let you annotate and color your notes. The downloadable Firefox add-on helps you use Notefish more efficiently.

Diigo lets you highlight and share pages all over the web. You can add sticky notes to pages for later reference and can access notes from your computer or iPhone. Saved pages can be organized with tags or lists. You can create groups to share resources for a project, and you can even enforce tagging rules among group members to keep things organized. Free and premium accounts are available (educators get a free premium account).

Concierge is a Safari plug-in that replaces the browser’s bookmark management scheme with an easier-to-use bookmark and information management tool. You can bookmark links and save links from email, Address Book cards, and folder and file links from Finder. It puts all of your relevant information in one place.

Information overload is a common problem when researching a new subject online. Great Summary helps combat the problem by summarizing the content of a web page, document or section of text for you. It identifies key topics on a page and presents relevant information without duplicating content.

EagleFiler is an information management app for Mac OS X that lets you archive and search PDF files, word-processing documents, images, web pages, mail and more. It has a three-pane interface similar to that of most email programs. Files are stored in a universal format, so they’re accessible from any application. Files can be encrypted, and you can add notes, tags, labels and meta data to them.

When you download something in Safari, no record is kept of where it came from. This can be a problem if you need to refer to it in a “Works cited” list or just want to know where to get similar content. DownloadComment adds a note in the file’s Spotlight Comments field with the URL of the original file.

HistoryHound lets you search the content of every web page and RSS feed that you’ve visited recently in Safari, as well as any bookmarked page. It ranks results by relevance. It’s a great way to track down information in resources that you’ve already discovered.

Reference Tracker is an app for Mac OS X that lets you store documents in one place for later reference and citation. It automatically creates a “Works cited” list in Harvard, APA, MLA or Chicago/Turabian format. It has built-in search and one-click referencing of web pages (in Safari or Firefox) and email (from Apple Mail).

Selenium is a research application for Mac OS X that combines a browser, PDF manager, word processor, bibliography manager and outliner in a single window. Research is much simpler because you don’t have to switch back and forth between different applications.

Evernote is an online note-taking application that lets you save just about anything, from notes to images to web pages. And it stores everything online, so you can access your notes from anywhere. There’s even an iPhone app.

Springnote is a free wiki-based online notepad. You can create personal or group notebooks and access them either online or through the iPhone app.

Google Notebook is a free online note-taking app that lets you create an unlimited number of notebooks and save notes, web pages and other information in a single place, accessible from anywhere. You can organize your notes by adding tags to them, as you would with Google Bookmarks.

Specialized Websites

Specialized online libraries exist for a ton of different subjects. Anything from language to science to technology to history has its own dedicated resource library somewhere on the Internet.

These collections can speed up your research, and they sometimes include only reliable websites. Here are some to get you started.

Arts

If you’re looking for information on art, whether museums, individual artists or art movements, Art Cyclopedia is the place to go. It lists 9,200 artists and has 140,000 links from 2,600 different art websites.

IMDb is a database of movies and television programs, dating as far back as film itself. You can search by cast member or title. Individual listings include all previous and upcoming roles. Movie results include cast and production crew, plot synopsis and other production information (often photos).

Medical and Scientific

BioMed Central publishes 200 open-access peer-reviewed medical and scientific journals. And you can search all 200 of them on the website.

History and Humanities

The Internet History Sourcebooks Project collects public domain and copy-permitted historical texts in one place. The collection includes ancient, medieval and modern texts, as well as ones of specific groups, regions and religions.

Digital History offers historical texts and resources from American history. It is run through a partnership with a variety of educational and historical organizations, including the University of Houston, the Chicago Historical Society and the National Park Service. It has resources for researchers and teachers, including multimedia resources.

The Perseus Digital Library is a resource of mostly historical texts from Tufts University. The digital collection includes material from Greek and Roman, Renaissance and 19th-century American history.

Project Gutenberg offers public domain books and written material for free. The collection includes fiction, non-fiction and poetry and is both searchable and browsable. Most of the content dates to the 19th century and earlier.

General and Scholarly

Intute helps individuals find the best websites on which to conduct their research. You can search or browse by category. It even offers free training on using the web for research and education.

Infomine is a search engine for scholarly resources. The categories, which are browsable, include the following: bio, agricultural and medical sciences; business and economics; cultural diversity; e-journals; government info; maps and GIS; physical sciences, engineering, computer science and math; social sciences and humanities; and visual and performing arts. It also includes general reference and advanced search functionality.

The Librarians’ Internet Index is a searchable directory of content from all over the Internet, broken down by category. It includes only reputable websites, making it easier to trust the information you find.

The IPL is another collection of resources from all over the web, broken down by category. The collections are targeted at children, teens, adults and educators. The collection covers art and the humanities, social science, law and government, computers and much more.

Find Articles from BNET lets you search articles from a wide range of consumer and trade magazines and newspapers. The articles are searchable and browsable by category.

The Library of Congress offers a ton of information, including digital collections. Its online collection includes history, performing arts, legislative information and international resources. It’s a particularly good source of government information, because its THOMAS system lets you search the full text of congressional records, bills and more.

You can learn just about anything with the resources and techniques mentioned here. As you research more topics and become accustomed to learning in this manner, learning new things will become easier.

Pretty soon, you’ll be able to gain a working knowledge of practically any subject after just a couple of hours of research.

Written exclusively for WDD by Cameron Chapman.

How do you find information online? Are there any other great resources that we missed? Please add them below…

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They’re a great extension to your business’ communication toolkit and offer you and your clients an excellent channel by which you can reach potential and existing customers.

In this article, we’ll explore common design patterns of email newsletters and learn which approaches work well, so that you’ll be prepared to create one for yourself and your clients.

We’ve also included a compilation and analysis of different newsletter designs so that you can learn from them as well as tips on what to do and what not to do.

If you know of any other tips, please share them with us in the comments area.

Which Came First: Chicken or Egg?

Before you create and send your email newsletter, you’ll need subscribers. Making this process as easy and intuitive as possible is important. After all, users are giving you permission to contact them. You wouldn’t want to mess that opportunity up!

Not Too Many Fields

You don’t need a user’s social security number to send them an email! It’s most frustrating when someone signs up for an email newsletter only to be confronted with a form that asks for their address, age, phone number, mother’s maiden name, favorite pet… All we really need is their email address and, if we want to push a bit further, their name.

Seth Godin, in his article Permission Marketing, offers good insight into getting viewers to sign up and follow you:

Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.

In other words, the viewer wants to listen to you. They are giving you their attention, so at least respect them and don’t ask for unnecessary data.

With that in mind, let’s look at some examples of good newsletter sign-up forms:

Joshua Porter’s sign-up form is an excellent example of what to do right. First, he puts the sign-up form close to his social icons, indicating that this is an extension of his communications with you, the user.

Next, he offers a short blurb explaining what the newsletter is about. This gets you and your users on the same page, so that they’re clear on what to expect from your content.

Finally, he asks only for the user’s email address and name, followed by a big button with a verb label: “Subscribe.” Very simple, yet packed with just the right information!

Threadless also puts its newsletter sign-up form in the social area of its home page. The location is prominent, and Threadless provides information on how often and when the newsletter will be delivered. Also, notice the simplicity of asking only for an email address: no name, no social security number, no favorite pet!

We’ve Got Subscribers!

Your sign-up form is now a success, and you’re ready to send out some content!

Before we move to the design stage, let’s figure out what the focus of our newsletter is. For example, if you are giving away coupons, you could use more graphics and buttons than usual. If it’s text-heavy, you’ll want it to be as readable and scannable as possible.

Let’s examine two newsletters with different goals. The first is from Barnes and Noble, offering promotions for its stores. The second is from Sitepoint, which gives its newsletter a magazine-style layout and structure.

The first thing you’ll notice about the Barnes and Noble newsletter is that it is designed like a website. It’s literally an extension of the main website, complete with top-level navigation.

You’ll also see that it’s timely; right next to the logo it says “This week,” reminding you that the offers are for a limited time only and that you should make your purchase quickly.

Notice how easy it is to scan the page. All of the paragraphs are short, and the images and content hierarchy make the design feel comfortable even in your email browser!

Finally, the designers have put a clever call to action at the bottom of the page. The numbers in big red type attract your attention, sitting beside buttons with verb labels, pushing you to take advantage of the promotion.

Sitepoint goes for a completely different layout because it has a different goal. Its goal is to build a following for its content, to be able to extend its advertising space.

It adopts a magazine style, starting each issue with a letter from the editor, followed by a table of contents (in-page links) that guides you to the concise articles in the email.

One important design decision made by Sitepoint was to include a photograph of the editor at the top of every email. This approach makes the email feel more personal, like it’s coming from a human who took the time to organize the content.

HTML or Plain Text?

Now that we’ve discussed your business goals for the email newsletter and how to support it with the design, let’s briefly consider the construction.

Back in the old days (i.e. three years ago), composing email newsletters in plain text was safer and more common. You would also see full-length articles incorporated in the email (as long as today’s blog posts).

Since then, people have discovered that they don’t really like reading long emails, and that scannable content that functions as a gateway to the main website makes more sense.

With this in mind, the most logical design would be a hybrid of images and HTML text. Jakob Nielsen has this to say about how much time users spend reading a newsletter:

Users spend 51 seconds reading the average newsletter. The layout and writing both need superb usability to survive in the high-pressure environment of a crowded inbox.

Once you’ve got a good hybrid design, you will have to dive in and code the newsletter (unless you have a great coder sitting next to you). A great resource for best practices and insight on the state of HTML emails is Campaign Monitor’s tips area:

Not only can you get started with one of the templates, but you can also consult a comprehensive checklist of supported CSS and HTML features in all modern email clients.

Email Newsletter Software

Now that we’ve got a solid grasp of what’s involved in creating an email newsletter that serves our business goals, we will choose the right software for our design.

You could, of course, manually write the scripts to create the newsletter, subscribe users and send out the email. But you likely have a business to run, and using tools that were created for these tasks would save you a lot of time.

Here are the three most popular email newsletter services today. They are all low-priced and feature-rich:

Campaign Monitor, which we mentioned earlier, not only has great resources for designers but also great prices: a flat delivery fee of only $5, plus $0.01 for each subscriber.

Mail Chimp is another popular email campaign service. It has a great analytics feature for your email newsletter campaigns and a free plan!

Emma offers email marketing with style. It even plants five trees for each customer who joins. If your business is growing, Emma allows you to easily adjust your pricing plan.

Inspiration

By now, you should have a good understanding of what’s involved in creating an email newsletter campaign for you or your client.

Now for some more fun. Let’s look at some email newsletters for reference and inspiration…

Apple looks good, as always. Its email newsletter is fresh, scannable and beautifully balanced. Notice the attention to detail, specifically how the buttons are color-coordinated with the images.

Zappos’ approach is similar to that of Barnes and Noble: its navigation at the top is an extension of the website, and it highlights its popular free 365-day shipping service.

Target also focuses on scannablilty and clickablity. Notice the email discount, rewarding you for following the newsletter.

Personal success guru Brian Tracy offers a clean, easy-to-read email newsletter. His approach is simple yet focused on his brand and main goal: helping you to achieve success.

Master chef Jamie Oliver has a more artistic email newsletter, keeping the visual language consistent with his upbeat and personal approach to cooking. The buttons match the background nicely and create a fun feel.

Think has followed sensible art direction for its newsletter. The design is consistent with that of its blog.

Clarus Wines beautifully illustrates its newsletter, giving it a human touch. The soft gray offers respite from your cluttered inbox.

A great example of borrowing real-world analogies (in this case, an event poster) and translating it to the web, Blick Shared Studios offers an attractively designed email newsletter.

If your interested in seeing more great examples, check out Campaign Monitor’s Inspiration Gallery.

When Should I Send?

We’re almost wrapped up, feeling inspired and ready to extend our communication with clients through an email newsletter! Just one more topic to cover, and that is what day to send it. 37 Signals has a humorous take on the question:

Want something to blow up? Tell the world about it on a Tuesday morning. Avoids the Monday avalanche people face and gives you the rest of the week to get play.

Want something to fade away? Tell the world about it on a Friday afternoon. It’ll fade into the weekend.

Written exclusively for WDD by Noam Almosnino, a web designer and blogger who helps businesses and individuals connect with their customers online!

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These are some of the more common mistakes that I’ve seen in web copy and some tricks that I use every day to write effectively, from e-mails to site pages.

You don’t need to be an English major to understand any of this advice either. It is written in plain English that everyone can understand.

These are tips based on my own experience and education as a writer, and particularly as a writer specializing in the web.

If you’ve got some tips of your own feel free to share them in the comments section.

1. It’s Versus Its

This is a very common mistake that a lot of people make.

It’s is short for “it is”, so “it’s all relative” is correct while “it’s color is blue” is not. “Its” is a term of possession, so “its color is blue” is correct.

2. Overuse Of Punctuation

Excess punctuation should be left out of most sentences on the web. If a reader sees a sentence with more than one comma, the sentence becomes harder to scan and therefore more likely to turn a reader off.

More advanced punctuation such as semi-colons and colons should be avoided completely by starting new sentences instead.

Example: “It is really important to keep three principles in mind, when thinking of the best shoes to buy; comfort, style, and eco-impact.” Should be: “Comfort, syle, and eco-impact should be kept in mind when thinking of the best shoes to buy.” Short, sweet and no semi-colon.

3. One Space After a Period

This is something I struggle with daily. It was drilled into my head, especially during University, that two spaces after a period were needed.

The convention for web writing is now one space after a period.

This is something that the owner of this blog gently pointed out to me, and I researched it extensively before implementing it. He was completely right.

4. Don’t Begin Sentences with “But”, “And”, or “Yet”

This is more common than you would think, and I have seen it from very established writers.

If you are challenging a concept from the previous paragraph or sentence, use “However” to start the sentence.

If you are trying to follow up on an idea from a previous sentence, don’t begin a new paragraph and just present the idea in the next sentence.

Your audience will leap with you without an introductory “and” or “but”.

5. Overuse of “Also”

I go through all of my articles for what I call the “A Word” before releasing them into the wild.

“Also” has its time and place, but frequent use looks like a grammatical hiccup and is highly noticeable after a while to your reader.

6. Keep Sentences Short

While this was covered in the section on punctuation, it is important enough that it needs its own heading.

A sentence should never be longer than a line. If you need to list something, do it with bullet points or an attractive graphic rather than producing a long sentence.

7. The Serial Comma

The serial comma is used before a grammatical conjunction, such as “and” for the last item in a list of commas. Its use has been a topic of hot debate by writers and people in the publishing industry for a long time.

Since web writing aims to keep itself as simple as possible, the usual preference is to do without the serial comma.

Some clients will insist on its use, especially if they are in occupations where a more formal use of language is the norm, such as law.

Example: “She likes the films of Ridley Scott, Martin Scorcese, and Clint Eastwood.” Technically its use is never really incorrect, but it does serve as excessive punctuation that can trip up the reader.

You want your audience to read the sentence, not to pause on the comma and ponder whether or not it is being used correctly.

8. Capitalize Words in Headlines

Excepting prepositions (of, to, for, is) and the words “and” and “the”, all major words in a headline should be capitalized.

I see a lot of copy where only the first letter of the headline is capitalized.

9. Their, There, and They’re

Their: Is a term used to illustrate possession, such as “their mitts were soaking wet”.

There: Indicates the whereabouts of something, such as “the statue is located there”. They’re: This is a contraction of “they are”. “They’re going to the beach today.”

10. Use Lots of Headlines

Ideally, any site page or blog posting should read much like this article, with a headline and then a paragraph or two.

Headlines act as important signposts for the reader to decide whether or not they want to read those paragraphs, so the headline should always describe the subject matter of the paragraphs which follow it.

This will look weird to those used to more conventional forms of writing, but the more you break it up, the more readable it is.

11. Use Spell Check and Your Eyes

Spell check isn’t always enough. If you spell “breakfast” as “break fast”, the typical spell check will not pick up on your mistake.

This is especially important for site copy. You can’t expect people to trust your brand or product if you have spelling mistakes on your page.

While a spelling mistake may be forgiven by your readers in a hastily written article or blog posting, it won’t be if it is present on a page that is trying to sell something.

12. Weasel Words

These are vague generalizations that are made for the convenience of the writer, not the audience.

If a writer is rushed for time, they may write something like “most people feel that juice is 100% tasty”.

The proper procedure is to find out the statistics and facts and work those into the sentence. The correct form would be “60% of people feel that juice is 100% tasty, while only 5% feel that it is only 10% tasty”.

Web readers are reading your site to get information, not opinions.

13. Then and Than

These words are very commonly misused. Then is indicative of a place in time, such as “there was no internet back then”.

Than is a quantitative term, which can follow the use of “more”, such as “there is no more annoying thing than a writer telling people how to write.”

14. Apostrophe Use

When you are considering whether or not to use an apostrophe, look at your demographic.

Is it a blog like this one that would benefit from a more casual style? Is it a website for a financial adviser?

The web is usually home to a more conversational style, but where you feel the context is more professional, don’t use the apostrophe.

Examples: Personal Blog for a financial adviser: “You’re going to find the new SEC regulations difficult to navigate without a little help.” Website copy for a financial adviser: “You are going to find the new SEC regulations difficult to navigate without a little help.”

15. Obscure References

Think of these as in-jokes with yourself or your industry that your clients just don’t get.

“This new album is more explosive than the Tunguska Event!” would be a good example of an obscure reference.

Again, this is context-specific. Referring to an episode of Star Trek by name will go over just fine on a Trekkie blog, but not in a mainstream news piece on science fiction.

16. Acronym Use

It is a good idea to limit acronym use even if you think your audience will know the acronym.

The 10% who don’t know it will be annoyed and may click off of your site. If an acronym will be repeated throughout a site page or an article, it is only necessary to define it the first time it is used. Once again, this is context-specific.

You don’t need to spell out AJAX for the readers of this blog, while you would have to for a mainstream media article. Wrong Acronym Use: “CPIC, CSIS, and the PAO are running a joint venture to better educate the public about how hard drugs finance international terrorism.”

Right Acronym Use: “The Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC), the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), and the Police Association of Ontario (PAO) are running a joint venture to better educate the public about how hard drugs finance international terrorism.”

17. Keep Person On Track

If you are referring to yourself as “I” at the start of your piece, don’t shift to “we” in the middle. Keep grammatical person use consistent.

18. Use Hyperlinks

If you are writing for the web, you want readers to be able to interact with your page.

You saw this above with the “Tunguska Event”. It was linked to a definition rather than leaving it up to you to look it up if you were interested.

If you are writing site copy for a business offering a product or service, use links to other areas of the site here and there to make it even easier for customers to find what they are looking for.

Keep both inbound and outbound links relevant and don’t use too many.

19. Overuse of Literary Devices

This is just good advice for any writing, online or offline.

Overuse of metaphors, similes, or any other literary device will distract from the point of your composition and make you look pretentious.

Literary devices are meant to help you get a point across in a certain way, so use them if you have to sparingly and move on.

20. Words to Avoid: Just and Regardless

“Just” can end up insulting your reader by implying that an action is easier than it actually is.

Look at the difference between these two sentences: “She says that I should just learn the French language.” “She says that I should learn the French language.

The first example makes it seem like the person is being talked down to, while the second sentence reads as more of a suggestion.Regardless should be avoided as it is a nonsense word that really doesn’t mean anything at all, right along with its sister word, irregardless. When included at the beginning of a sentence, the words are not necessary, as you can see in these examples:

Regardless, the show must go on.
Irregardless, the show must go on.
The show must go on.

Written exclusively for WDD by Angela West.

Do you have a pet peeve word or phrase that you would like to see eliminated from the web or tips of your own? Share them in our comments section!

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A wireframe helps you organize and simplify the elements and content within a website and is an essential tool in the development process.

A wireframe is basically a visual representation of content layout in a website design.

The wireframe acts as a prototype that shows the placement of page features, such as header, footer, content, sidebars, and navigation.

It also specifies the placement of the elements within these content areas. If you want to develop a site that accurately matches the client’s requirements and minimize project revisions, wireframing will keep you on track.

Benefits of Wireframing

Creating a wireframe gives the client, developer, and designer an opportunity to take a critical look at the structure of the website and allows them to make revisions easily early on in the process.

Wireframing brings the following key benefits:

• It gives the client an early, close-up view of the site design (or re-design).
• It can inspire the designer, resulting in a more fluid creative process.
• It gives the developer a clear picture of the elements that they will need to code.
• It makes the call to action on each page clear.
  
• It is easy to adapt and can show the layout of many sections of the website.

Tools for Wireframe Development

You have many tools to choose from when creating a wireframe:

• Hand sketching on paper is always a good starting point for any designer. It provides a quick and easy way to focus and organize. If you’re very precise with sketching, you could even use this as your final wireframe. (See Figure 1.)
• Flowchart or mind-mapping software, such as Visio. These software options come with pre-packaged elements that allow you to easily create flowchart representations of your wireframe.
• Web prototyping software, such as Gliffy or Balsamiq. Tools like these were created especially for the purpose of generating wireframes, and they have easy-to-use prototyping capabilities.
• Graphics software, such as Photoshop or Illustrator. The benefit of using these tools is that the wireframe can then be converted directly into a graphic mockup of the website’s design; however, the downside is that you will have to create all of the elements by hand.
• (X)HTML wireframes are almost like actual sites themselves. You can lay out the wireframe with code before applying the styles, or you can create a fully styled, high-fidelity layout that looks a lot like a final design. (See Figure 2.)

Ultimately, the developer or designer should select the tool they prefer. Personally, I use Photoshop because I like the way it organizes the process and how easily I can convert the file into a mockup.

Wireframe Example

The level of detail in a wireframe depends on several factors, including: how much direction and content the client has provided, how complex the content is, how far along in the process you are, and how much detail you’d like it to include.

Here are examples of wireframes that were created using different tools and exhibiting different levels of detail and color:

Figure 1: This simple wireframe sketch for the Coastal Capital Partners website (now renamed Broad Reach Retail Partners) was used to create graphic mockups and, eventually, the final design. By Mike Rohde.

Figure 2: Very low-fidelity HTML wireframe. Useful for demonstrating what a site will look like before the styling is added. Very helpful to visually impaired users.

Figure 3: Low-fidelity wireframe for the Embrace Pet Community, by Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain of 31Three.

Figure 4: A preliminary mockup of a social conferencing tool built on Tiddlywiki for use at Le Web 3. The notes to accompany it are at tiddleleweb.tiddlyspot.com. Wireframe by Phil Hawksworth.

Figure 5: This one is based on advanced use of a blog publishing system (WordPress). By Mattheiu Mingassson or Activeside Internet Strategies and Consulting.

Figure 6: A wireframe for the Embrace Pet Community, by Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain of 31Three.

Figure 7: A wireframe with color and images. Author page wireframe by Bokhandel.

Figure 8: Another wireframe with color. By Mattheiu Mingassson of Activeside Internet Strategies and Consulting.

Best Practices

To achieve optimum results, here are several important things to keep in mind when developing a wireframe:

• Simplicity. The key is to keep it simple enough to be clear to the client and to be flexible for the designer, but detailed enough to guide the programmer. As mentioned, you could create a high-fidelity wireframe, but doing this early in the development process could be confusing for the client, who may mistake it for a final draft.
• Work in grayscale. When creating elements for a wireframe, it’s best to work in grayscale so that you can focus on the layout without being distracted by the design. If you have been given a full-color logo, convert it to grayscale as well. To distinguish between and categorize various elements, show shapes and outlines in different shades of gray.
• Use wireframes in tandem with a sitemap. A wireframe is a visual representation of a good sitemap, not a replacement. A sitemap is a useful tool for any website and would definitely be helpful to refer to during the development process.
• Focus on the desired outcome. Have a clear understanding of how your client wants users to respond to the page before creating your wireframe. The calls to action should be very clear simply from looking at the wireframe.
• Create a full-sized wireframe if it is for a website. This will give the most accurate representation of the actual page.
• Plan the elements by securing the content in advance. In a best-case scenario, your client will have already supplied you with the elements that should appear on each page, such as the logo, ads, Flash or video players, features, navigation sections, and sidebar, header, and footer elements. If you do not have this information yet, meet with your client and get (or create) a sitemap. If you are re-designing existing elements, you can gather them from a careful review of the website. In this scenario, be sure to first confirm with your client that you will not be required to add or remove elements, because not having a clear understanding of their expectations will slow down the process.

Grayscale vs. Color

When creating a wireframe, working in grayscale helps maintain focus on the primary function of the process, which is to finalize the layout, not the design (see Figure 3). Another risk of working in color is that the client may mistake the wireframe for the final mockup.

Color can, however, prove useful when showing the location of each call to action.  Because one page may contain several calls to action, prioritizing them is important. Wireframes can help determine which call to action to draw the user’s eye to first.

I recently worked on a project that had a very vibrant logo, which, in that case, was the primary call to action because it represented a newly launched magazine.

When you use color, you can more easily tell if certain elements are overpowering the primary call to action. This process still falls under the realm of wireframing, rather than mockup design, because element locations are still being determined.

Color can gradually be added to the wireframe as the project advances, which is more efficient than moving ahead with mockups before the location of elements is locked down. In doing this, graphic software can help you switch directly to a mockup when ready.

What to Avoid

Like other aspects of your development process, wireframing can have its pitfalls if not carried out properly. Here are some tips on what to avoid in order to acheive the most effective results:

• Too much happening on the page. Leave ample white space so that the design doesn’t appear too busy or cluttered.
• Emphasis on color and design. Wireframing is for deciding the layout and location of elements. Even though a wireframe can influence the design, adding graphics and color would probably only distract from its purpose.
• Too much detail. You can always add more detail later, but if you include too much in the begining, the client may confuse the wireframe for the final mockup.

If you are interested in learning more about wireframes, Wireframe Magazine is a great resource that shares samples, discusses techniques, and solves problems related to information architecture.

Creating a wireframe for your client’s website provides an effective communication tool for all parties involved.

Even building a simple wireframe will save time in the long run and ease the development process for the designer, developer, and client.

Written exclusively for WDD by Eric Shafer.

Do you use wireframes for your design? What are some of the best ways to create effective wireframes?

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And trying to find related content can also be difficult, depending on what data you’re looking for.

But data visualizations can make all of that much easier, allowing you to see the concepts that you’re learning about in a more interesting, and often more useful manner.

Below are 50 of the best data visualizations and tools for creating your own visualizations out there, covering everything from Digg activity to network connectivity to what’s currently happening on Twitter.

Music, Movies and Other Media

Narratives 2.0 visualizes music. Different music tracks are segmented into single channels that are then shown in a fan-like structure.

Liveplasma is a music and movie visualization app that aims to help you discover other musicians or movies you might enjoy. Type in the name of a band, artist, movie, director or actor and liveplasma will show you related people, bands or movies.

Tuneglue is another music visualization service. Just type any artist or band into the search box and hit enter. A circle comes up representing that band. You can then expand from there, clicking on any new additions after each expansion to expand further. By click on “releases” you can order their albums from Amazon.

MusicMap is similar to TuneGlue in its interface, but seems slightly more intuitive. Search for an artist or band and a list of albums will come up. Once you choose an album a circle pops up on the map. From there you can expand to get related albums, remove that album, or get more information.

Last.Forward is a downloadable, open-source tool to visualize any Last.fm user’s social network, including relationships between other users.

Fidg’t is a desktop app that uses Flickr and Last.fm tags to let you visualize your network and their tagging activities. You can see what your network’s predispositions are toward different tags and types of content.

Digg, Twitter, Delicious, and Flickr

Looks Del.icio.us is a collection of different Delicious bookmark visualizations. They’re created with a python-based graphics library and layout engine.

Arc is a product from Digg Labs that shows the latest Diggs, and the relationships between the users submitting and digging them. There are two different speed modes, the slower of which is great if you actually want to read the story headlines.

Stack is probably the most useful of the visualization offerings from Digg. Stories with the most recent activity load across the bottom of the screen and then ‘Diggs’ seemingly fall from the sky to land and create a real-time graph of what stories are popular. Whenever a ‘Digg’ hits a story stack, the title of the story is shown at the bottom of the screen, pushing previous stories down, and eventually off the screen.

Swarm has one of the cooler user interfaces of all the Digg Labs offerings, with stories and users flying around on the screen. When someone ‘diggs’ a story, they fly over to the circle representing the story itself and are briefly linked up to it. Hovering over a story or user shows its name and allows you to click. You can also download Swarm as a screensaver.

Research Chronology shows the relationships between one student’s research paths via Delicious bookmarks over the course of a semester. It’s an ongoing project and includes bookmarks for more than 270 websites.

TwittEarth shows live tweets from all over the world on a 3D globe. It’s a great visualization tool to see where tweets are coming from in real time and discover new people to follow. It’s also fascinating just to sit and watch.

Tag Galaxy lets you search for Flickr tags and have them shown visually in a mockup of a star system. Clicking on any planet (tag) within the first representation changes the image and recenters that tag as the star and pops up new related tags as planets. Clicking on the sun itself brings up a globe covered in images tagged as you’ve specified.

The Flickr Related Tag Browser allows you to search for a series of tags and see related tags. Clicking on a different tag brings up new related tags. You can zoom into the tag selected in the center of the screen by hovering and see images tagged with that word. It also gives a total image count and lets you browse by page.

Internet Visualizations

Mapping the Blogosphere is a collection of maps of the blogosphere, including hyperbolic maps, as shown here.

The Twingly Screensaver visualizes the blogosphere worldwide in real time. You get a continuous feed of blog activity straight to your screen.

Web Trend Map 4 shows a visualization of current trends online. This is the fourth iteration of this map and the most detailed one yet.

The Bloom Diagram is a project from the IBM Watson Research Center that visualizes the contributions of individuals to open source projects.

Akami Real-time Web Monitor shows a map of the world with real-time information about internet traffic, latency and current network attacks. The maps are color-coded and easy to read, but only give very generalized information.

The Mapa de Conocimiento (Map of Knowledge) is a schematic of knowledge involved in any given idea or project. Built in Flash, this tool visualizes a group of URLs organized under main ideas. The map is available in English and Spanish.

Akami Network Performance Comparison shows the packet loss and network speeds between different cities around the world (to showcase how their technology is better than the standard “public” internet). It also shows graphs of the information.

Internet Health Report shows the latency, packet loss, and network availability of the major ISPs and backbone providers worldwide in a color-coded grid format. Hovering over any of the cells in the grid gives more information about the health of that particular connection.

The Hierarchical Structure of the Internet was a study that looks at how the Internet is organized, both in terms of structure and connectivity. It shows how the central core of the Internet is made up of about 80 core nodes, but that even if those nodes failed, 70% of the other nodes would still function via peer-to-peer connections.

Rootzmap—Mapping the Internet is a series of maps based on data sets provided by NASA and created by Philippe Bourcier. There are a number of different maps available.

Websites as Graphs shows the structure of different websites based on the tags used in their code in a color-coded map that grows on the screen as you watch. Tags are somewhat intuitive in their color-codes, with blue for links, red for tables, and gray for any tags not specifically given a color.

Schemaball visualizes SQL database schema. Relationships are shown based on foreign keys within tables. It’s capable of showing schemas with hundreds of different tables and relationships.

The Opte Project aims to map every class C network on the Internet from a single computer and a single Internet connection. The overall goal is to create a map of the entire Internet.

Miscellaneous Visualizations and Tools

Visualizing Information Flow in Science includes a set of four visualizations showing relationships between citations in scholarly journals that are used to evaluate the importance of each journal.

The Micro Fashion Network: Color visualizations show the continuous change of styles in fashion, with a particular look at the basic elements of color. It was created by using a fixed camera and special software to map the colors of clothing people in Cambridge were wearing.

The TED Sphere shows videos from the TED conference in a spherical format with 3D navigation. You can view the sphere from inside or outside and the layout of videos is based on semantic compatibility.

Visualizing The Bible gives a visual overview of more than 63,000 textual cross-references within the Bible. It’s intention is to be more beautiful than functional.

Walrus is a visualization tool that allows you to interact with massive graphs in a 3D interface. Interaction is based on selecting any node and then having the graph zoom in to expand on that point.

We Feel Fine is one of the most interesting visualization tools I came across. It provides visualizations on the general feelings populating the blogosphere on any given day. You can filter results based on age, location, gender, weather, and other criteria. There are six different visualizations available: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds, each of which give a different portrait of the general feelings abounding on the internet.

One Week of The Guardian is a visualization of the stories from The Guardian newspaper. It focuses on the relationships between headlines, authors, pages, and categories.

Nemulator is a project that aims to visualize “nemes,” or different fragments of states of mind. It also aims to serve as a starting point for discussions relating to the scalability of nemes.

Voyage is a web-based RSS reader that visually displays RSS feeds on a timeline. It’s a great way to explore the different feeds you subscribe in a completely different format.

Blooming Numbers is the 2006 CGD MFA Thesis Project of Yuri Lee. It’s goal is to show the relationships between preferences of numbers and cultural contexts in an interactive way.

CIA World Factbook Visualization shows a visualization of relationships between different countries and continents based on data from the CIA World Factbook. It shows semantic relationships for each country, including neighboring countries, languages, water and terrestrial boundaries, and more.

TextArc Visualization of The History of Science is a static visualization of the book The History of Science. It was originally displayed at the NYPL Science, Industry, and Business Library in New York.

This Newspaper Map is a visualization of the rules of the daily production of a newspaper is a striking graphic format. The closeness of words signifies their relationships with each other as do lines traced between words.

GraphNews is a news visualization browser from the Libero WebNews service. It shows news stories in a mind-map-like format. Clicking on one node recreates the graph with the clicked item as the focus.

Newsmap shows a visual representation of current headlines on Google News. It shows the relationships and patterns between different news stories across cultures and within different news segments. Be sure to click to the new JavaScript version for the best features.

FreeMind is a Java-based mind mapping software that allows you to build your own data visualizations quickly and easily. Finished maps can be exported into clickable XHTML files as well as other formats.

Resource System Reference Database was presented as a poster at InfoVis2004, IEEE’s annual conference. In this visualization, line weight shows the strength of relationships.

Is the New documents instances of the phrase “is the new” and shows the relationships between the subject and object of that phrase. Examples include “Purple is the new pink” and “Technology is the new religion.”

WikiMindMap is a tool to visually browse Wiki content in a mind-map format and includes the ability to download any of their mindmaps in FreeMind format.

How Scientific Paradigms Relate shows the relationships between more than 700 scientific paradigms based on how they were mentioned in more than 800,000 scientific papers. Relationships are also based on how often different papers were cited by each other and by authors of other papers.

Universe is a great app for visualizing the “universe” of particular search terms. There are sample terms available or you can input whatever you choose. The visualization given is reminiscent of astronomical charts.

visualcomplexity.com isn’t strictly a visualization software, but rather a collection of visualizations already created and categorized. Categories include business networks, art, internet, knowledge networks, biology, transportation networks, social networks, and more.

The Strengths of Nations is a visualization of the scientific advancement of ten different nations, including the United States, United Kingdom, France, China, and Australia. The map analyzes 23 different scientific areas, including math, biochemistry, and astrophysics.

Written exclusively for WDD by Cameron Chapman, a freelance writer and designer.

Which 0nes are your favorites?  How important is the way we visualize data? Please share your comments with us…

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