In recent years, it’s become easier and easier to publish information about yourself online, through powerful new platforms like social networking sites and photo sharing services. One way to manage your privacy on these sites is to decide who specifically can see this information, determining whether it is visible to just a few friends, family members or everyone on the web. But, another important decision is choosing how you are identified when you post that information. We have worked hard to build various identity options into Google products. For example, while you may want to identify yourself by name when you post an answer to a question in a forum so that readers know the response is reputable, if you upload videos about a controversial cause you may prefer to post under a pseudonym.However, your online identity is determined not only by what you post, but also by what others post about you -- whether a mention in a blog post, a photo tag or a reply to a public status update. When someone searches for your name on a search engine like Google, the results that appear are a combination of information you’ve posted and information published by others.
Today we’ve released a new tool to help make it easier to monitor your identity on the web and to provide easy access to resources describing ways to control what information is on the web. This tool, Me on the Web, appears as a section of the Google Dashboard right beneath the Account details.
Savvy web users may already have used Google Alerts to set up notifications for mentions of their name or email address in websites and news stories. If you haven’t set up alerts yet, Me on the Web makes it even easier to do so and even automatically suggests some search terms you may want to monitor.Me on the Web also provides links to resources offering information on how to control what third-party information is posted about you on the web. These include common tips like reaching out to the webmaster of a site to ask for the content to be taken down, or publishing additional information on your own to help make less relevant websites appear farther down in search results.
This is just one of our first steps in continuing to explore ways to help make managing your identity online simpler.
Real estate information marketplace Zillow® today expanded and improved its living database of homes, adding more than 25 million new Zestimate® home valuations and improving Zestimate accuracy nationwide. Zillow now has data, Zestimates and Rent Zestimates on approximately 100 million homes – more than three-quarters of all homes in the United States.
In the past five years, Zillow users have submitted information on more than 28 million homes, adding updates, such as remodel or home fact information, that are not reflected in public records. This gives Zillow an inimitable database of nearly every home in the country, and creates unique home profiles that allow Zillow to calculate more accurate Zestimates on more homes. The new Zestimate algorithms launched today incorporate more of this user-submitted data, among other changes.
The expansion brings Zestimates to homeowners, buyers and sellers in states like Iowa and New Hampshire, where Zestimates were not widely available. The Zestimate median margin of error is now 8.5 percent nationwide, and below 6 percent in major metropolitan areas such as Denver, San Diego and Washington D.C.
"At Zillow, we have an unwavering commitment to give people as much free information about real estate and homes as possible, and Zestimate home valuations are a big part of that," said Zillow Chief Economist Stan Humphries. "We've spent six years cultivating our database of nearly all homes, creating a unique and living entity that combines public record data with information submitted by Zillow users on more than 28 million properties. By expanding the Zestimate algorithm to include more data points and new modeling approaches, we have been able to expand Zillow's footprint and improve accuracy. We are thrilled to offer this resource to even more consumers and professionals across the country."
Zillow launched Zillow.com in 2006, with Zestimates on more than 40 million U.S. homes. Since then, Zillow has more than doubled Zestimate coverage nationwide, added 100 million Rent Zestimates, and made significant improvements to the breadth and accuracy of data. Zestimates are a starting point in determining a home's value; together with a home's value range, comparable recent sales, and current listings, Zillow's information helps consumers gain an edge in real estate and make more informed decisions. Zestimates and other home information can also be found on Zillow Mobile, the most popular platform of mobile real estate applications across iPhone, iPad, Android and Blackberry.
Zillow's Zestimate accuracy is published on its website, and updated every three months. More information is available at http://www.zillow.com/howto/DataCoverageZestimateAccuracy.htm.
via MapYourMoves
Map your moves – A visual exploration of where New Yorkers moved in the last decade
Data
This map distills more than 4000 moves from over 1700 people, collected in an informal survey by WNYC, a New York based public radio station.
For generating the geo–coordinates from the entered ZIP codes, I used the free bulk geocoder at gpsvisualizer.com. I did not check every single data row in detail, so a few of the moves might be misrepresented.
Mapping
As most moves occurred from, to or within the New York area, this area displayed enlarged in the white circle at the center of the graphic. The rest of the world is mapped with a damped distance function, in order to fit everything into one screen without losing too to white-space.
Visual markers
Each circle corresponds to one zip code area. Its size indicates the number of moves to or from the area.
Actually, it is consists of two overlaid circles: a red one for people moving out of the area, and a blue one for people moving to the area. So, a small purple circle with a thick blue outline indicates a place where people tend to move and stay, whereas a red outline indicates a less attractive place.Interaction
Click one of the circles to inspect only moves to or from this area. Or, to inspect a whole cluster of areas, drag to create a radial selection bubble. To clear your selection, click on the background. Moves to a selected place are indicated with a blue line, wheres moves from a selected place are drawn in red.
Details
On the right, you can find some statistics on why and when people moved to the selected areas.
You can directly compare the lengths of the red (for people moving away from the selected areas) and blue (for people moving to the selected areas) bars to spot trends and peculiarities. Moreover, you can compare these values to the baseline (overlaid in grey), which indicates the relative proportion when we consider at all moves. If, for instance, the blue bar for "landlord issues" is smaller than the red bar, this means that the selected area has a relatively low fraction of people moving away because of landlord issues.
If the world were a village of 100 people, how would the composition be? This set of 20 posters is built on statistics about the spread of population around the world under various classifications. The numbers are turned into graphics to give another sense a touch – Look, this is the world we are living in.
- via Toby Ng
Online advertising is a remarkably complex field. Terence Kawaja has a new way for potential investors to visualize it.
The market involves hundreds of small and large companies that help advertisers reach consumers and help website publishers, mobile-application developers, search engines and other digital destinations generate revenue through advertising.
Kawaja, who runs boutique investment firm LUMA Partners, spent months putting together six new graphics that show how 1,240 different companies fit into the following categories of online advertising: display, video, search engines, mobile, social, and commerce. (See slides below, or click here for the LUMA site.)
The graphics, Kawaja says, help “large strategic acquirers” such as Google, Yahoo and Adobe to identify possible targets of acquisition.
Kawaja, well-known in the online advertising industry, rose to greater prominence after publishing a graphic in 2009 that attempted to make sense of one particularly fragmented aspect of online advertising: the market for graphical, interactive and video ads, a category known as display, which generated $10 billion in U.S. spending last year, according to eMarketer. The graphic became an important tool used by online ad executives.
For instance, after the graphic was published Kawaja represented Invite Media in its acquisition by Google last year. (Invite allows advertisers to buy ads through digital exchanges that match websites with advertisers, known in the industry as a demand-side platform).
Kawaja’s 2011 graphic on the display-ad market includes newcomers such as TellApart, which helps advertisers do what’s called “retargeting,” or showing graphical ads to Internet users for products they previously expressed interest in. The new “social” graphic lists the companies such as Vurve and Efficient Frontier that help marketers advertise on Facebook, Twitter and other social-networking-type sites such as LinkedIn and Loopt.
The graphics, which Kawaja is branding as “LUMAscapes,” will evolve as he receives feedback about other companies that should make the cut. Some ad executives say the graphics will be a point of discussion during this week’s Digital Media Summit, a gathering of chief executives of private Internet companies as well as investors in New York.
Check below for the full list of new graphics, and click on the images for the larger version.
- Mobile LUMAscape [Click the image to enlarge]
- Search LUMAscape [Click the image to enlarge]
- Commerce LUMAscape [Click the image to enlarge]
- Video LUMAScape [Click the image to enlarge]
- Display LUMAScape [Click the image to enlarge]
- Social LUMAScape [Click the image to enlarge]
via blogs.wsj.com
I’d like to share a brief demographic analysis of social networks that helps explain who uses social networks, and for what purpose.
Before diving in, I think its best to discuss where our data comes from. Amzini is a directory of over 900 social websites that are visited over 7 billion times per month, by over 900 million visitors (Compete.com). We collect demographic information on each website from Alexa.com, who uses their toolbar to provide estimations of the audience's composition for each site. On an individual site level, these statistics often must be taken with a grain of salt due to small sample sizes and Alexa's bias towards the technologically saavy crowd. However, since our statistics are deduced from 900 websites that average 9 million visits/month per site, our demographic figures provide a unique and informative new look into the social networking industry.
The demographic averages for our entire data set tell a familiar story; social networking is dominated by younger generations with no children, and online networking activity picks up in college. Now that I told you what you already know, let’s look at a categorical breakdown and heat-map featuring demographic data separated into Amzini's 11 main categories.
Age
As a whole, we see exactly what we expected... social networks are most popular among the youngest generation (18-34) and are used less frequently for each successive age group over 35. This trend is often attributed to an increased likeness for technology among youth. However, the heat map to the right highlights the important role generational differences in interests plays in creating such a young social networking demographic.
Youth ages 18-24 tend to use social networks to supplement social life, learning, and having fun. These happen to be the three strongest suits of social networking. The categories that are most popular among this age group are Friends/Dating (social life), info-sharing/education (learning), and creative arts/gaming (having fun). Combined, these 6 categories make up about 91% of the total visits per month among sites on Amzini!
The most diverse use of social networks comes from the 25-34 year old age group. This demographic tends to continue to use the services they used in college, but less often. However, as they start to have new interests (business, family), the data suggests this is the age group most likely to use online social engagement to benefit their business/career, discuss or plan travels, and share family-related experiences online.
For the demographic above 35, there is clearly some technological bias against social networking. However, the reasonably high likeliness of these age groups to use business, family, and dating networks suggests that social networking's popularity among youth may be not just be due to technological differences, but to a better fit of interests.
Questions
Social options are becoming available for more and more new interests... Do you think these networks are entering in response to a more diverse market? Or do you think the market is diversifying due to innovations that make social engagement valuable for a more diverse set of needs?
Education
The participation rate for social networks across the board tends to be higher for people with college-level education. In college, your network expands beyond your hometown and there is a tremendous amount of information shared between students. As mentioned before, social networking is a great fit for these needs, so the high use among people with college education is not surprising.
Two categories break this trend. The first, Gaming, has an unusually high participation rate among people without college experience. With an extraordinarily young following, it is likely that a high percentage of gamers are simply too young to have college experience.
The second trend-breaker, Places, has a very high participation rate among people with graduate-level schooling. This statistic can likely be attributed to the positive correlation between graduate school and income, and between income and travel.
Questions
Does it surprise you that Gaming is the only category where social networks are used more often than other sites among people with no college experience?
Gender and Children
A social network's gender is probably the demographic most strongly influenced by the community's niche. Many categories present data in line with stereotypes... Gaming is strongly dominated by males, lifestyle and family by females. There are, however, some surprises here. Dating, Places, and Business actually are used more often by females while education networks are used most by males. Are these as you expected?
The dominance of a population without children is likely strongly influenced by the correlation between age and having children. It is also likely that older generations have a decreased need to meet new people as they settle down and have kids. The obvious exception to this trend is the 'Family' category, for which having kids is often the primary reason for participation in the first place.
Browsing Location
The heat-map of browsing location reveals strong use of social networks in the workplace. This raises an interesting debate. On one hand, strong engagement with social networks at work may suggest social networking is becoming a distraction in the workplace. On the other hand, this engagement may be representative of the increasing application of social websites for practical purposes (beyond socializing with friends).
Social networking is becoming a growing asset to businesses as both a marketing and a communication tool. While extremely strong numbers for the Business and Places categories likely reflect this use, you have to wonder if lifestyle, friends, and interest networks are being used in a social context rather than just for marketing purposes.
Questions
What do you think about the use of social internet at work? Do these numbers reflect a growing importance of online communities for businesses? Or are social networks becoming a distraction for workers?
We've given some brief interpretations of this interesting data set, but there are many interesting topics of discussion that we have not covered. What story stands out to you?
via vimeo.com
Mapnificent shows you areas you can reach with public transport in a given time.