Infographics are quite the rage at the moment. There is something quite compelling about a well-constructed visual piece of story-telling that helps you understand complex information quickly.

Here’s one with a  difference – a “stats infographic” that is equally compelling, telling you what happens on the web in sixty seconds. Things like:

• 98,000 tweets
• 13,000 iPhone apps downloaded
• Over 125 WordPress plugins downloaded
• 695,000 Facebook status updates
• Almost 695,000 search queries
• 168,000,000 emails sent
• 100 new accounts created at LinkedIn
• 20,000 new posts on Tumblr, the up-and-coming microblogging platform

Even though no source for any of the info is cited, it’s ideal for that PowerPoint deck to help you explain what’s happening on the web. Mind-expanding stuff!

Nice work from Shanghai Web Designers. Via AdverBlog.

People who monopolize conversations are either a) narcissistic jerks doing it on purpose or b) accidental jerks who just need a gentle reminder now and then to shut their yaps. Talk-O-Meter is your secret weapon for the latter category: it's an iPhone app that uses voice recognition and biofeedback to compute, on the fly, which person in a conversation is doing most of the talking. So instead of looking at your watch, or interrupting, you can just point to the Talk-O-Meter screen as if to say, "You might want to wrap this train of thought up."

I asked the app's designers what inspired their creation -- were they were surrounded by rude people? Actually, it was the opposite. "The thought behind Talk-O-Meter is that people are not rude, and their too-much-talking can be changed by giving them this friendly bio-feedback," Reinhard Wiesemann tells Co.Design. When you first fire up the app, it asks each speaker to talk normally so it can establish who is who. From there, you can tell it to monitor the conversation in 1, 3, or 5-minute intervals. At the end of each interval, it'll display a bar split into two colors, representing the ratio of who spent the most time flapping his gums.

The app is clever and cute, and the designers have an admirably charitable view of human nature, but it's hard to see how Talk-O-Meter wouldn't come off as supremely passive-aggressive in real life. After all, in order for it to function correctly, you have to pull it out and pre-calibrate it together before actually starting your "real" conversation -- it's as if the person with the app is pre-judging their partner as a blabbermouth just by setting it up. I suppose an alternative would be to pull out Talk-O-Meter and say "Actually, this is for your benefit because I tend to go on and on" -- but that's hardly an invitation to normal conversation either.

Maybe the best use case for Talk-O-Meter is a perversely geeky married couple who are intimate enough not to take offense at the mere use of the app, but are interested in data-mining their conversation patterns anyway. Sounds like a great setup for an episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm."

[Read more at Talk-O-Meter; top image by iMorpheus]

Infographics already gets tons of play on the web. But geek superstar Golan Levin wants to spread them even further. So he developed an adjustable stencil that lets you spray paint pie-chart data visualizations of your own making on walls, highway underpasses, the house of your high school math teacher -- wherever! As someone noted perfectly on Twitter, it’s “Bansky meets Tufte.”

And anyone can use it. The design, which Levin whipped up for the techie art collective Free Art and Technology Lab (F.A.T.), is available gratis online. It comes with a set of re-arrangeable letters and a flexible piechart pointer so you can switch up your message to your heart’s content. (One downside: You’ll need a laser cutter -- which is pricey and kinda' limits who can make this thing.)

Levin thinks infographiti (see what we did there?) is a potent political tool. Which makes sense when you think about it: Street art provokes by being everywhere it shouldn’t be. Data viz provokes because it makes actual points. Combine the two, and you’ve got something pretty damned powerful on your hands. Not that we’re advocating that you go out and deface public property; we’re law-abiding citizens, officer! But hey, if you want to stencil horrifying global warming stats on the side of BP’s headquarters, that’s your business.

Audio Flowers [last.fm] is the result of extensive research conducted at Last.fm into new techniques to measure structural change (or "complexity") in rhythm, harmony and timbre directly from MP3 files.

These three numerical measurements have been averaged to produce a single image, resembling the petals of a flower with the respective colors red, green and blue. The inner origin of the flower represents the average variability value of the shortest time scale (2 seconds), while the tips correspond to the variability values of the longest one (64 seconds).

The aim of these little summary visualizations is to allow people to get a better overview of the complexity of individual music tracks. Currently, the audio of about 17,000 tracks have been analyzed and visualized in this way. However, to assure they are on the right track, the developers are requesting volunteers to compare pairs of music tracks to check the accuracy of these flower depictions with the actual human perception.