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Digg City is a visualization developed in response to Digg’s recent API contest. It works by utilizing the image of a city block - with ten different buildings symbolizing the most popular articles on Digg. The buildings grow taller as the story grows in popularity, with individual stick figures representing users who digg the story. When the mouse hovers over a building the article’s headline appears with a link to the page featuring it.
This program reminds us that the city is a remarkably natural way to exhibit user activity on websites. This example demonstrates clearly the relative popularity of articles, while also displaying individual user activity (here the pace of people digging).
This idea of city as visualization platform has been explored before in a number of applications - the most salient of which is VisitorVille. In VisitorVille (like in Digg City) each building is a web page. In this case instead of remote websites each building is a page on your server. Visitors who enter the city are not diggers - simply the regular visitors of the site. VisitorVille shares a remarkably similar visual language with Digg City in addition to their purposes as traffic visualization tools.
The idea that the city (an environment with which we are usually quite familiar) is a natural visualization platform for this kind of information raises some interesting questions about how we repurpose human constructs for our own understanding.
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