This is a reprint from SmashingMagazine

Read Full article here

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/05/14/useful-podcasts-for-designers-and-developers/

by Sean Hodge

Podcasting is an engaging medium that is available
in both audio and video formats. Podcasts often refer to audiocasts,
but now with iPods and other media players being able to play video,
videocasts are just as popular. A handful of web design podcasters
deliver both audio and video formats. Some do so through the same
subscription, others separate the two.

Audio podcasts are a great way to stay informed about web design news, learn about emerging technologies,
listen to discussions, and continuously learn about the ever-changing
landscape of web design — on your way to work or before you go to bed.
Videocasts are great at showing step by step tutorials, or delivering
visually rich presentations. Many of the long running successful
podcasts have communities built around the show. Forums and detailed
show notes are usual for a podcast that regularly serves its community.
The time span of how long a podcast exists often indicates its level of
quality and professionalism.

We’ve amassed a collection of podcasts that are either directly
about web design, or would be helpful to a web designer. If you’re
interested in more podcasts try searching through Odeo or iTunes.
There are quite a few web development podcasts, and a few niche topic
web design podcasts, not covered in this roundup. Following is a list
of useful podcasts for web design professionals.

You may want to take a look at the article

• Professional Web Design Forums which covers forums dedicated to web designers and developers.

Web Design Podcasts

• Boagworld
  Boagworld is a
  long running web design podcast. There are over 100 podcasts Paul Boag
  & Co. have put out. They have been covering standards based design
  from the beginning of the show. They do a lot of great interviews with experts
  from the field of web design. There is always web design-related news,
  a special theme of the show, and some fresh content covered. The
  content is well organized, nicely presented and it is funny, too. The
  banter between Paul and Marcus is often the best part; the podcast has
  a large community built around the show. 

  

• The Rissington Podcast
  This web design podcast takes the format of answering questions
  from its fan base. Each subject that comes up is discussed. This show
  is informal and loaded with fun British humor. The fans tend to send in
  as many humorous questions as they send in questions asking for web
  design advice. The podcast is still young, with less than ten released
  so far. The hosts John Oxton and Jon Hicks are well versed in web
  design techniques and technologies. They are also well-known in the
  design community. 

  

• Audible Ajax
  This podcast is hosted by Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith. These guys are technically savvy, passionate about scripting and run a professional podcast about Ajax.
  They discuss news on Ajax, related technologies, and the significance
  of changes in this field. They have been broadcasted this podcast since
  2005. The schedule is irregular, on occasion it’s monthly, though not
  always. The Ajaxian site is a great place to keep up with what’s
  happening in the world of Ajax. 

  

• Web Axe
  This podcast is focused on web accessibility.
  Hosts Dennis Lembree and Ross Johnson are passionate about this topic.
  They cover web accessibility issues in detail. They review technology
  solutions in regards to accessibility, how WCAG guidelines can be
  practically applied in web design, and they present numerous interviews
  of working professionals that work with accessibility issues daily. The
  podcast has been regularly broadcasted over the last 2 years. Over 60
  issues are available for free download. 

  

• Rookie Designer
  The host of the podcast, Adam Hay, covers a variety of web design-related topics
  — colors, freelance, interviews, technical design and customer service
  — which are useful for both beginners and professionals. The podcast is
  updated weekly every Wednesday. One episode is 45-50 minutes long.
  Until now 98 episodes have been aired. 

  

Web Design Conference Podcasts

• Future Of Web Apps
  This
  conference somehow manages to involve a variety of professionals and
  companies of all shapes and sizes that are actively involved in building innovative web projects.
  The most recent event was attended by Matt Mullenweg (WordPress), Kevin
  Hale (Wufoo), Leah Culver (Pownce), Tantek Celik as well as Digg,
  TechCrunch, Google and Twitter. All presentations are available as
  podcasts for free download. This page offers a large number of
  interesting and insightful sessions as podcasts. 

  

• @media 2007 Europe, @media 2007 US
  This conference is held each year, both in Europa and in US. @media speakers are renowned web professionals,
  with experience, talent and passion for web design and web-development.
  Last conference in US was attended by Andy Clarke, Dan Cederholm, Joe
  Clark, Jeremy Keith; the recent European conference was attended by
  Jesse James Garrett, Jon Hicks, Kelly Goto and Jason Santa Maria.
  @media regularly offers podcasts and slides of all presentations for
  free download. 

  

• South by Southwest Podcast
  These
  podcast have been recorded at the SXSW Interactive Festival Panels.
  These are professional presentations put together by this festival that
  is held annually in Austin, Texas. There are some interesting issues
  discussed. SXSW has released a handful of 2008 podcasts. For some
  topics, it may be worthwhile to review previous years podcast materials
  as well. Podcasts from 2007. 

  

• d.Construct Conference Podcast
  This
  conference is held each year in September, and is located in Brighton,
  UK. The podcasts are recorded presentations from the conference. They
  have multiple podcasts of presentations on topics such as: experience
  design, graphic design, web design, microformats, and mobile design.
  The last conference was in 2007. Clear Left presents this conference. 

  

Content Management System Podcasts

• Lullabot Podcast
  Lullabot releases a fairly regular podcast on the Drupal
  content management system. A variety of Drupal-related topics is
  covered in more than 50 podcasts. Hosts often discuss the significance
  of technological changes within Drupal: system release issues, new
  significant modules and documentation projects. Both subjects for
  beginners and advanced users are covered. In each episode usually 3-5
  people participate, discussing Drupal and related topics. There is a videocast as well. Lullabot is an agency that is known for teaching Drupal and building large Drupal projects. 

  

• The WordPress Podcast
  This podcast covers all things related to WordPress.
  Blogging, web design, hosting, WordPress plugins, and many other
  topics. Charles Stricklin runs this podcast, and Jonathan Bailey is the
  co-host. They interview members from the Wordpess team and other
  professionals as well. For each episode there are follow-up-links and
  show notes. 

  

• Joomla Juice Podcast
  This podcast is focused on the Joomla
  content managment system. It doesn’t come out regularly, but it has
  been produced since 2006. The format for the show is an audiocast,
  though they mix in videocasts occasionally as well. The audiocast has a
  multi-media element that allows you to see what they are talking about.
  The links are embedded in the visuals. Pete Russell is the host. He
  interviews key influencers from the Joomla core team and Joomla
  community. 

  

Web Design Videocasts

• Web Design TV Videocast
  .Net
  Magazine publishes the WDTV videocast. Before the format changes in
  March of this year, they had a podcast that was hosted by Paul Boag.
  Now it’s a “tutorial-style” videocast. Each episode
  focuses on a different web application, and teaches how to create
  specific types of projects. The basics of using tools within each
  application program are covered as well. So far, mostly Photoshop and
  Flash have been covered. Each video podcast is about 15 to 30 minutes
  long. The new release schedule has been weekly so far. 

  

• Adobe Creative Suite Video Videocast
  Terry
  White is the host of this videocast. Terry and guests follow a tutorial
  format. They teach you tools and features within each of the Adobe Creative Suite
  software products; some of them are used in web design. Flash,
  Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and other applications are covered. The videos
  range from short 5 minute tutorials, all the way up to more than an
  hour long sessions. It’s a weekly series you can subscribe to in your
  favorite media player. 

  

• Lynda.com Videocast
  The feature of each of these videocasts is a video from one of the training series
  available at Lynda.com. These videos cover a wide range of software,
  design, and programming languages. The podcast is published to promote
  Lynda’s membership sales, but each weekly episode is informative and of
  course free. There is no obligation to buy, though it’s tempting after
  seeing the quality of each weekly video. 

  

• Photoshop User TV
  This
  show is hosted by Dave Cross, Matt Kloskowski, and Scott Kelby from the
  National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP). They cover
  shortcuts, tips and tricks, timesaving techniques, interviews, and
  tutorials related to Adobe Photoshop. The quality of
  the show is very professional. If you use Photoshop regularly, this is
  a very useful videocast to learn from experts and professionals. 

  

• Layers TV
  Layers
  TV is produced by Layers Magazine, “the how-to magazine for everything
  Adobe”. The show is focused on step-by-step video tutorials and tips on
  how to work with Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, Dreamweaver,
  AfterEffects and Flash. The show is released every week and is 20
  minutes long. So far 34 episodes have been aired. For all tutorials
  source code as well as further examples are provided for free download. 

  

• PixelPerfect
  The
  host of this podcast, a professional digital artist Bert Monroy.
  presents tips and tricks you need to whip those digital pictures into
  shape with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. The episodes are presented
  weekly and are often step-by-step-tutorials, each 15 minutes long. 

  

• Photoshop Killer Tips
  This
  podcast presents Adobe Photoshop tips, timesaving shortcuts,
  workarounds, and undocumented tricks. The host is Matt Kloskowski, one
  of “The Photoshop Guys” from Photoshop User TV. New shows are posted
  almost each weekday. 

  

• You Suck at Photoshop
  Of
  course, this list would be incomplete without narrator Donnie Hoyle and
  his dramatic, hilarious and always excellent podcast about professional Photoshop techniques.
  Unfortunately, the series has ended after the 10th episode. Hopefully,
  the show will come back. The podcast gained eight million page views
  and two Webby Award 2008 nominations (Best Comedy and Best How-To
  Series). For further Adobe Photoshop video tutorials check our recent
  post Adobe Photoshop Video Tutorials: Best Of. 

  

Further podcasts

• CreativeXpert Podcast
  Alan
  Houser is the host of this podcast. He has a professional voice and a
  professional approach, with over 10 years of audio and video production
  experience. He also finds interesting people to interview and asks
  probative questions. The show doesn’t stick to a regular schedule, as
  only one episode has been released so far this year. 

  

• The Web 2.0 Show
  This podcast has released more than 40 episodes. It comes out sometimes weekly and sometimes monthly. The show centers around interviewing developers and entrepreneurs
  who create web projects and are invovled in interesting web ventures.
  This show provides you with a view behind the scenes of some of these
  innovative companies that are using and defining the “Web 2.0″
  technology. 

  

• Geeks and God Podcast
  Bob
  Christenson (Rob Feature on the podcast) and Matt Farina are the hosts
  of the show. These guys are both upbeat. They plan the show well, and
  it moves along at a quick pace. There is a community built around the
  forum of the site as well. The show is aimed at church ministries,
  but the information covered is often applicable to any website. Rob and
  Matt are well versed in website design and development. They give
  practical advice on the nuances of web design, building websites, and
  running web communities. 

  

• You Suck at Web Design Podcast
  This is a comedic podcast put out by freelance web designer Matthew D. Jordan. He creates fictional stories related to web design.
  He describes the podcast as an attempt to deal with web acronyms, such
  as Web 2.0, WYSIWYG, and Ajax. His “disdain for the corporate world,”
  as well as “micro management,” permeates through his stories. You’ll
  likely either love this podcast, laughing uncontrollably, or you’ll
  hate it, and end up breaking iTunes. Mathew describes his humor as,
  “juvenile” and “not-baddish.” 

  

Sean Hodge is the creative mind behind AiBURN.com, a weblog about design, creativity, inspiration and graphics.

 

 

 

The Best Tools for Visualization

Written by Sarah Perez / March 13, 2008 9:25 AM

Visualization

is a technique to graphically represent sets of data. When data is
large or abstract, visualization can help make the data easier to read
or understand. There are visualization tools for search, music,
networks, online communities, and almost anything else you can think
of. Whether you want a desktop application or a web-based tool, there
are many specific tools are available on the web that let you visualize
all kinds of data. Here are some of the best:

Visualize Social Networks

Last.Forward: Thanks to Last.fm’s new widget gallery,
you can now explore a wide selection of extras to extend your Last.fm
experience. The gallery hosts widgets for your desktop, for the web,
for social networks, and much more. One of the better tools in the
gallery, last.forward, is open source software that lets you map out any last.fm user and their connections. The web site for the software appears to be in German, but the “Download” button still works. And once it was downloaded and installed, I had no trouble using it myself.

Last Forward

Friends Sociomap: Friends Sociomap is another Last.fm tools that generates a map of the music compatibility between you and your Last.fm friends.

Fidg’t: Fidg’t
is a desktop application that gives you a way to view your networks
tagging habits. You can see what kind of music your network is into, or
what kind of pictures they are taking. The Fidg’t Visualizer allows you
to play around with your network. To use Fidg’t, you interface with the
Visualizer through Flickr and LastFM tags, using any tag to create what
they call a “Magnet.” Once a Tag Magnet is created, members of the
network will gravitate towards it if they have photos or music with
that same Tag. You can also search through the network for certain
users, and see their recent photos and music. The Fidg’t interface is
beautiful, too.

Fidg’t
The Digg Tools:

Digg.com has some of the best web-based visualization tools on the net, so they’re a must for any visualization list.

• Pics: Digg Pics is
  the latest tool that tracks the activity of images on the site with
  images that slide in from the left as people submit them and digg them.
• Arc: Digg Arc displays stories, topics, and containers wrapped around a sphere. The more diggs, the thicker the arcs.
• BigSpy: Digg BigSpy places stories at the top of the screen as they are dugg. Bigger stories have more diggs.
• Stack:
  Digg Stack shows diggs in real time, with diggs falling from the top of
  the screen. As stories get more diggs, they’re shown in brighter
  colors.
• Swarm: Digg Swarm draws circles for stories as they’re dugg. Diggers swarm around stories which makes them grow and get brighter.

One more: Digg Radar.
Although this is an unofficial visual aid, Digg Radar is worth a look
too. With Digg Radar, you wait and watch for buttons to appear on the
map which indicate that a person has Dugg a story. Hover over the
button to see their username. Click it to see details about the story,
with links to the Digg page or directly to the article.
YouTube:

You can discover related videos using YouTube‘s
visualizations. To use this feature, go to a YouTube video, click on
the full-screen button, and then click on the small button that shows a
network. You’ll see a lot of video balloons appear and the
configuration will change when you hover over a button.

Visualize Music

• Liveplasma and Musicovery let you discover new music.
• Tuneglue
  music map is a “relationship explorer,” similar to LivePlasma. Using
  data from Amazon and Last.fm, Tuneglue explores relationships between
  musical artists.
• Moody lets you tag your music collection with colors. They also have a color-coded web player. (our coverage)
• The Echo Nest
  is an audio analysis tool which takes an mp3 file, breaks it up into
  little segments, and gives pitch, loudness, and high-level timbral
  descriptions of each one of those segments. The program maps a subset
  of this audio data onto a visual scale and creates video playback of the song. (more)
• An interactive harmony model
  of music which geometrically describes relationships in harmony. The
  model can be a visualization tool for songwriters or students of music.
• Musiclens gives music recommendations and presents your current mood and musical taste as a diagram.
• Shape Of Song: What does music look like?
• Musicmap: connections are represented as connected lines; they create a web.

Musicovery

Last.fm music visual tools:

• Last Graph: Create artist wave graphs from your musical history in PDF and SVG format.
• Extra Stats: Colorful Stats and tag clouds.

Visualize the Internet

 
• Opte
  is a project that lets you graphically map the internet. The data
  represented and collected here serves a multitude of purposes: Modeling
  the Internet, analyzing wasted IP space, IP space distribution,
  detecting the result of natural disasters, weather, war, and
  esthetics/art.
• Akamai Technologies, who deliver 15-20% of
  all web traffic offered up some interesting tools last year for viewing
  their traffic data. (Our coverage) From their flagship app, the Real-time Web Monitor, which shows countries with the most traffic to the Network Performance Comparison app, Akami’s tools are an interesting way to see the web in real time. In all, they offer 6 Flash-based apps to the public.
• Other internet traffic visualizations include the Internet Health Report and the Internet Traffic Report.
• MantaRay displays the geographical placement of MBONE infrastructure (Multi-cast backbone) of the internet. Otter displays topological views of the (same) multicast infrastructure.
• Packet Garden is an app that watches your Internet traffic and builds a private world that you can later explore.
• Mapnet is a Java applet to visualize the topologies of backbones of major U.S. Internet Service Providers.
• Websites as graphs.
  An HTML DOM Visualizer Applet, which displays sites as graphs depending
  on the amount of links, tables, div tags, images, forms and other tags.

Packet Garden

Amazon

• LivePlasma: music discovery (see also music section of this list)
• Flowser is another flash-based Amazon visualization for search.
• BrowseGoods is a visualization that lets you zoom and pan Amazon’s catalog of products.
• Tuneglue
  music map is a “relationship explorer,” similar to LivePlasma. Using
  data from Amazon and Last.fm, Tuneglue explores relationships between
  musical artists. (see also music section of this list)
• Coverpop is more of an art project that lets you browse Amazon via a collage.
• Amaztype,
  a typographic book search, collects the information from Amazon and
  presents it in the form of keyword you’ve provided. To get more
  information about a given book, simply click on it.

Flickr

• Taglines lets you to visualize Flickr tags over time
• Flickrvision: view real-time flickr photos on a map.
• Flickrtime
  is a tool that uses Flickr API to present the uploaded images in
  real-time. The images form the clock which shows the current time.

Some details on these: see “Alternative ways to browse Amazon” (our coverage)

Miscellaneous

 
• Visual Thesaurus: The Visual Thesaurus is an interactive dictionary and thesaurus which creates word maps that blossom with meanings and branch to related words.
• Twittervision: view real-time tweets on a map.
• 17 More Ways to Visualize Twitter
• All the ways to visual del.icio.us collected here.
• Three Views
  shows three views of the earth, in which each country is represented by
  a circle that shows the amount of money spent on the military (size of
  circle) and what fraction of the country’s earnings that uses (color).
• We Feel Fine shows human feelings calculated from a large number of weblogs.
• Interactive History Timeline presents the history of Great Britain, divided into interactive data blocks.
• Winning Lotto Numbers shows the frequency of appearance of every number from one year to the next one.
• Language Poster – the history of programming languages

Sites Dedicated to Visualization

• IBM’s Many Eyes (our coverage) is a shared visualization and discovery service offering all kinds of visualizations you can explore or create.
• Informationarchitects.jp
  presents the 200 most successful websites on the web, ordered by
  category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective in a mindmap.
• VisualComplexity.com is an online collection of visualizations (our coverage)
• Infosthetics discusses the aesthetics of data visualization
• Blogger Anonymous Professor is into visualization, offering visualizations like the 3D visualization/tour of classical music/composers, Visualization of the StumbleUpon network, the value of a Digg and more.
• Zip Codes visualized

Many Eyes

Search

Heatmaps:

Heatmaps site CrazyEgg applies
heatmaps to tracking what visitors do on a user’s website. Their
software captures user clicks on each page and then presents a summary
in the form of a heatmap. Other heatmap sites include Feng-GUI and FuseStats. Summize applies heatmaps to shopping via their search engine(our coverage here, here and here).

Visualizing the Power Struggle in Wikipedia displays the most popular articles and the most frequent search queries in the heatmap.

Visual Search Engines:

• Riya’s Like.com: first true visual search engine does visual search for shopping.
• Searchme: upcoming visual search for the web
• Xcavator:
  A photo search engine which utilizes visual clues that you provide to
  identify and extract similar pictures from large groups of digital
  images.
• ManagedQ: A visual search experiment with some built-in semantics. (our coverage)
• oSkope: Visual search engine for finding products that searches Amazon, Ebay, Flickr, Fotolia, Yahoo!Image Search and YouTube.
• Quintura: visual search engine that uses clouds, tags, and highlighting.
• Tafiti: Microsoft’s experimental visual search engine running on Silverlight.
• Retrievr is an experimental service which lets you search and explore in a selection of Flickr images by drawing a rough sketch.
• Mooter: Visual search engine that organizes results In clusters.
• KartOO: visual web searc.
• SearchCrystal
  is a search visualization tool that let you compare, remix and share
  results from sources on the web, whether sites, images, videos, blogs,
  news engines or RSS feeds. (see also KoolTorch)
• Spacetime: search Google, YouTube, RSS, eBay, Amazon, Yahoo!, Flickr and images all in one 3D space.
• grokker: web search or enterprise search offering map views of data.
• Burst Labs suggests similar or connected items to your search queries in a bubble
• UBrowser renders interactive web pages onto geometry using OpenGL and an embedded instance of Gecko
• walk2web – enter a URL, then visually browse web sites linked from it
• TouchGraph‘s Amazon Browser, Google Browser, and LiveJournal Browser

Touchgraph

News and RSS

• Voyage is an RSS-feader
  which displays the latest news in the “gravity area”. News can be
  zoomed in and out. The navigation is possible with a timeline
• Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator.
• Universe DayLife displays events, connections and news as circles which gravitate around the topic they are related to.

Data

• Swivel create pie charts, diagrams and histograms.
• Xtimeline and Circavie let you create your own timelines
• The prefuse visualization toolkit – thebeta-version of a Java-based toolkit for programming of applications with integrated data visualization methods
• Dataesthetics Eric Blue on unusual Data Visualization methods.
• Smashing Magazine’s Diagram tool list
• America by the Numbers (Time.com)

Swivel