But in our thirst for data, have we forgotten that infographics aren't just numbers, icons and pretty colors? That they still need to tell a compelling narrative? Actually, all panelists agreed, the best place to start when it came to crunching data was not by combing our infants for numbers (in fact, I think most doctors will agree one should not comb infants at all). Carter had a quite revolutionary method for finding his information: Picking up the phone. Yes, most of the New York Times' award-winning infographics are researched, by a team of about 30 people, who do their reporting the old-fashioned way. It's true, said Fry, it's always better to take a real world approach that doesn't include an Excel document. "If you start with data, you'll end up with something that looks like data." And as beautiful as he is, let's hope it doesn't look like Data Baby, either.

Few are using sophisticated tactics

E-mail is a well-tested marketing tool, but rising volume and cluttered inboxes mean marketers must find ways to stay relevant to consumers.

Procrastination is a huge productivity problem with no obvious solution: everybody does it, and no matter how smart and efficient you work, you're always going to do it in some capacity too. The only thing you can do is choose to get SOME thing done, even if it's not THE thing you're putting off.

Digital measurement firm comScore’s Andrew Lipsman blogged some stats about the Chatroulette pop culture phenomenon today. He shared details about the site’s sudden growth and its demographics.

If you’ve used the random video chat site before, you’ve already figured this part out: Chatroulette is dominated by college-aged males. Male users make up 72% of the site’s audience, and people of any gender aged 18-24 account for 45%.

Males aged 25-34 and females 18-24 are the second biggest demographic behind males 18-24. Females outside of the 18-24 range are not very likely to use the site, but even males 35-44 make up a chunk of the userbase. Here’s the graph; 100 represents the average Internet user.

Great presentation !

According to the latest Hitwise analysis, Google's lost its crown as the most-visited Web site in the U.S. last week. The new king of Web site traffic is, of course, Facebook. In the future, technohistorians may marvel at this event.
During the Winter holidays there were a few momentary spikes in traffic which placed Facebook on the top, but if you check out the graph of the long term trend shown above, you can see Facebook's meteoric rise is now on target to meet or beat Google. And if that curve continues on its trajectory, which it may well do for a while (its market share is 185% up over the same week in 2009, for example,) Facebook will become number one by a huge margin, versus the tiddly little 0.04% separation it currently has above Google's 7.03% share of average weekly market share.
Over at Inside Facebook they're pondering if the early-February revamp of Facebook's user landing page is partly responsible, since it emphasizes Top Stories over a real-time stream--which is something users may prefer. But if you peep at Facebook's market share curve, it's not a smooth linear climb, and the gentle oscillations in increasing market share are more probably representative of slight changes in Facebook's popularity or appearance in broadcast media. Besides, it seems that Facebook continues to attract more members, and sees those members interacting more with the site, pretty much no matter what it does to redesign its services.

Other sources: http://weblogs.hitwise.com/heather-dougherty/2010/03/facebook_reaches_top_ran...

Your host, Merton, freestyling in real-time with random strangers on Chat Roulette.

To answer some viewer questions:

No piano lessons, Merton is self-taught.

Not Ben Folds. Seriously. He is a much better pianist, and listen to the voice on the "Man in the Dark" part - totally not his voice at all.

If you took a guess at what sites get all the traffic online, you'd might guess that Google searches and social networking suck all our time online, and the rest goes to shopping. Actually, no.

To get a rough estimate of how the Internet is actually being used, the BBC charted the top 100 sites by unique users in January 2010, encompassing the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Brazil, U.S., and Australia.

The top reason to friend a brand on Facebook was to receive discounts, followed by simply being a customer of the company and a desire to show others that they support the brand. On Twitter, discounts, up-to-the-minute information and exclusive content were the main draws; only 2% of respondents followed brands on Twitter to show their support.

BlackBerry users were almost equally likely to say they would switch to iPhones or Android phones if they purchased a new smartphone.

In addition, nearly all iPhone and Android users said they would recommend their respective operating systems to friends.

While Android users reported downloading the most free applications over the past seven days, iPhone owners came in ahead when the question was limited to paid apps.