Blogging presents one of the most fascinating social phenomenons of our time. This change in the flow of online information might radically change the way we look at news providers and large media conglomerates. The result of a MFA thesis at Parsons School of Design, Blogviz is a flash driven visualization model for mapping the transmission and internal structure of top links across the blogosphere. It explores the idea of meme propagation by assuming a parallel with the spreading of most cited URLs in daily weblog entries. The main goal of Blogviz is to unravel hidden patterns in the topics diffusion process. What's the life cycle of a topic? How does it start and how does it evolve through time? Are topics constrained to a specific community of users? Who are the most influential and innovative blogs in any topic? Are there any relationships amongst topic proliferators?
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, nominated by Creativity magazine as "one of the 50 most creative and influential minds of 2009", Manuel Lima is a Senior UX Design Lead at Microsoft and founder of VisualComplexity.com - A visual exploration on mapping complex networks.
Prior to joining Microsoft, Manuel worked as a Senior User Experience Designer at Nokia and Senior Interaction Designer at the leading digital agency R/GA. He holds a BFA in Industrial Design and a MFA in Design & Technology from Parsons School of Design, New York. During the course of the MFA program, Manuel worked for Siemens Corporate Research Center, the American Museum of Moving Image and Parsons Institute for Information Mapping in research projects for the National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency.
Manuel is a leading voice on information visualization and a frequent speaker in conferences and schools around the world, including TED, Lift, OFFF, Reboot, VizThink, IxDA Interaction, Royal College of Art, University of Manchester, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Northeastern University, ENSAD Paris, University of Amsterdam, MediaLab Prado Madrid.
