The Big Picture - Macro Perspective on the Capital Markets, Economy, Technology, and Digital Media

Via Visual Economics, we learn Its Google’s planet — we just live on it:

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http://www.visualeconomics.com/2010-02-03-planet-google-from-philosophies-to-market-shares/

Interesting graphic approach describing  the recent crisis from the Harvard Business Review:

Each big circle on the map represents GDP; the 3.6 trillion in Bailouts and the 9.4 trillion in Stimulus are reflected as a percentage of GDP in red and blue respectively . . .

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Hat tip Joe C.

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Source:
Vision Statement: A Map to Healthy—and Ailing—Markets
Grail Research and de Luxe & Associates
January–February 2010
http://hbr.org/2010/01/vision-statement-a-map-to-healthy-and-ailing-markets/

Pretty wild: Panoramic video of Haiti, via CNN.

Use your mouse to click and drag around the video to change the view. You can also zoom in and out. Pause and explore at any time by pressing the play/pause button under the video to stop and look around — all while the video plays.

The video was shot on Sunday, January 17, at 3:53 p.m. EST in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

hat tip kottke

I have an odd problem.

Most birthdays and holidays, I seem to end up with a pile of media — CDs, DVDs, other forms of digital recording. Much of these goods come from Amazon.com. Percentages being what they are, some of the discs are damaged.

Examples:

• Californication Season One Disc 1 plays really poorly — freezes, doesn’t advance, skips — its a bad recording  (Having seen the first 6 episodes on Showtime, I bought the DVD for my wife, and for the next 6 to catch up with season 2).

• Marvin Gaye’s The Master 1961 1984 Box Set as soon as I got the set, I ripped it. But I didn’t notice  Disc one (of 4) has only one channel; the other 3 are fine.

Californication was apparently a wide-spread production problem, and Amazon refunded the discs despite the purchase being made on November 11, 2009 and the discs open (The return window closes on January 31, 2010). Amazon gave me a hard time about replacing Disc 1 of the Marvin Gaye Box Set.

For the holidays, I received the Curb Your Enthusiasm full set, and BBC’s The Planet with David Attenborough (an 11-part series shot entirely in high-definition — the video is spectacular) I cannot possibly watch/listen to all of this stuff within 60 days of receipt. Half the stuff I buy for myself is for future usage, and the gifts are sometimes not reviewed for many months. For the holidays, I gave a managing director at our firm the Family Guy – The Total World Domination Collection — 23 DVDs. He has an other 5 weeks left to finish checking it out.

Short of hiring someone to preview all of my digital media, or becoming a torrent phreak, is there any sort of solution to these production errors of digital products?

Any ideas how best to handle this?

On Monday, I showed a chart via The Economist magazine that hugely made doing global comparisons of real estate prices as snap.

My boy Paul showed me how to get the embed working properly!

Check it out:

Here’s a quick snapshot of global economic progress:

click for really ginormous

Hat tip Flowing Data

You can also order the full sized print here

via infosthetics, we see these two interesting maps showing US and Worldwide traffic of the Times website:

US

The New York Times site traffic, US, June 25, 2009 from Nick Bilton on Vimeo.

Global

The New York Times site traffic, World View, June 25, 2009 from Nick Bilton on Vimeo.

Another year, another collapse in CD sales.

For the eighth time in nine years, U.S. album sales declined. That’s according to data compiled by Nielsen SoundScan.

Album sales fell to fell to 373.9 million units, a 12.7% decline from 2008. Total sales fell a whopping 52% since 2000. CDs still account for almost 80 percent of all album purchases.

Paid online song downloads continued to grow, but at a pace that was too slow to make up for lost CD sales.

1.16 billion individual songs were purchased digitally, an increase of 89 million units, or 8.3%, from 2008. That represents a significant slowdown in digital-sales growth. In 2008, sales of digital songs increased by 226 million, or 27% over the previous year. Digital downloads now account for 40% of music purchases.

For the Year:

• Taylor Swift’s  “Fearless” released in November 2008, sold 3.2 million copies in 2009 (total sales = 5.3 million copies.)
• Susan Boyle’s “I Dreamed a Dream,” which came out only six weeks ago, sold 3.1 million.
• Michael Jackson’s “Number Ones” was No. 3 for the year, with 2.4 million sales; Lady Gaga’s “The Fame” by  is No. 4, with 2.2 million in 2009; Andrea Bocelli’s “My Christmas,” was No. 5, with 2.2 million

For the Decade:

• The best-selling artist of the 2000s was Eminem, selling 32.2 million albums;
• The Beatles’ were a close second, selling 30.2 million albums;
• Tim McGraw was the third-best-selling artist of the 2000s, with a total of 24.8 million; Toby Keith was 4th at ~24 million; and Britney Spears was No. 5, at just under 23 million.

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Sources:
Albums by Swift and Boyle Top 2009 Charts, as Sales Continue Plunge
BEN SISARIO
NYT, January 6, 2010

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/arts/music/07sales.html

U.S. Album Sales Fell by 13% During 2009
ETHAN SMITH
WSJ, JANUARY 7, 2010

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703882804574642764293968586.html

To hell with Japan, we have already had our lost decade — or at least so says the Washington Post. And, it was more than just the stock market that lost ground over the past 10 years:

• Job growth was essentially zero;
• Economic output (GDP) was weak.
• Household net worth (inflation adjusted) fell as stock prices stagnated;
• Home prices declined in the second half of the decade
• Consumer debt skyrocketed.

Here is how the 2000’s compared with a few other decades:

click for larger graphic

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Source:
The lost decade for the economy
NEIL IRWIN, CRISTINA RIVERO AND TODD LINDEMAN
Washington Post, January 1, 2010

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2010/01/01/GR2010010101478.html

Aughts were a lost decade for U.S. economy, workers
Neil Irwin
Washington Post, January 2, 2010

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/01/AR2010010101196.html

Visuwords is is a visualization tool based upon Princeton University’s WordNet.

The online graphical database — part dictionary, part thesaurus — that groups words by their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. These related linguistic ideas are visually displayed in an interactive graphic.

The most interesting visual displays come from the broadest topical words. Try words like Music, Biology, War; I’ve had more luck with nouns than verbs.

Each node can be further opened, revealing related ideas, words, etc. As an example, here is what “Economics” looks like:

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Click for interactive graphic>

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For the above, I used the Fill Browser setting — a scalable, widescreen display.