Santiago Ortiz is at OFFF for the second time. He is here to talk about Bestiario, a studio focused on complex data visualization.

Santiago Ortiz presents 6pli.com

He first shows a very nice interface for a non-public project that let advertisement agencies visualize in different levels society trends or tendencies. He finishes showing different experiments visualizing del.icio.us data and its interesting properties due to the Tag & Record (set of Tags) structure.

A more experimental visualization interface for del.icio.us can be found at 6pli. Santiago explains the limitations of working with del.icio.us due to the limited flux of data allowed by the del.icio.us API.

Future exploration lines of Bestiario will focus on unifying Tags by Language, so art will be considered the same Tag as arte or kunst (Spanish and German terms for art). This method could apply also to synonyms.

North Kingdom & Jorge Calleja are on stage to talk about one very successful project developed together with Goodbye, Silverstein & Partners.

Jorge Calleja (left) and North Kingdom

The “Get the glass” on-line game is a real “super production”. We have the chance to see how it was built and have a good feel about how much investment such a project requires. Very good and professional presentation that keeps high attention of the audience.

Mario Kliengemann is a guy from Munich who loves working with pixels. He has developed very nice audiovisual experiments based on Flickr.

The Island of consciousness and Flickeur are based on the following loop:

1) Take randomly a recently posted picture
2) Select three arbitrary Tags attached to the previous picture
3) Choose a next random picture based on the Tags above
4) Repeat steps 2 and 3 on and on

Mario shows lots of stuff and finishes with a very good counterpoint to the Web 2.0. He says there’s a lot of stuff about sharing what the user like, but nothing about what the users actually don’t like, so he came up with The Stake.

Mario Kliengemann presents “The Stake”

The Stake let the user search using Amazon’s engine for books, music or films that the user actually wants to burn! The Stake is meant to have all these Web 2.0 features such as top burnt titles, the user who burned this CD also burned this other book, and so on. Some ironic humor really appreciated by the audience who gives a warm applause to Mario.

Stamen conference

Stamen are behind the development of the Digg Labs. A company focused on data visualization and design. Unfortunately Stamen has some problems with the internet access, so we cannot see any live demo but some sample videos of their experiments and projects.

“Visualization does not necessarily answer questions but points you to what questions do you need to ask” – This is, in my opinion, a brilliant sentence that defines perfectly what these visualization tools are helpful for. Furthermore, the “Digg blue line” was a perfect example of it. The blue color represents a new user in Digg. Something being “dugg” by a huge amount of “blue users” might be very suspicious, don’t you think?

Stamen shows also a very nice project called cabspotting, a software that tracks cab traffic in San Francisco using GPS data. With this project it is possible to observe most common cab circuits and their locations.