Basic data visualizaton

Internet users by country in 2010

This is the first of five graphics in a series, State of the Internet 2010. All are hand-made graphics by Jose Duarte. He is exploring new and simple ways to represent information. With his handmade visualization tool-kit, he provides the technology to rapidly create any kind of graphics including

abstracts maps and diagrams, area graphs and charts, arrow diagrams, bar graphs, Venn diagrams, time line charts, bubble graphs, circle diagrams, proportional charts, organization charts, and really, whatever you want.

Do you want your own kit? Follow the link embedded above, and follow the instructions. It can be yours, free of charge, no-strings-attached. Just send an email to Jose Duarte as instructed in the text accompanying the “handmade visualization tool-kit” link.

Fault testing in the cloud

The impact of an Amazon Web Services* Elastic Cloud 2 outage is being determined at this very moment. It will be interesting to do some post-situation analysis, and see what the effect was on global web traffic. That is not possible at this time, as EC2 remains off-line.

Many sites are unaffected of course.

Happily, a single cloud provider has not become indispensable for the internet. This should reinforce the viewpoint that alternative provider services, at least two or three, are always to be encouraged. The BBC provides a fine summary of the situation.

*This is the product more commonly known as AWS EC2.

Amazon fault takes down websites

21 April 2011 Scores of well-known websites have been unavailable for large parts of Thursday because of problems with Amazon’s web hosting service. Foursquare, Reddit and Quora were among the sites taken offline by the glitch. No reason has so far been given for the outage.

Amazon’s cloud service last hit the headlines when it decided to stop hosting a mirrored version of the Wikileaks website. However, at this stage, there is nothing to suggest that the most recent outage was related to the Wikileaks controversy.

Read more at www.bbc.co.uk