Infographic Greatness

Remember getting the new National Geographic and the thrill you got in pulling out the huge, color foldout map? That is the feel I get from looking at the six maps dealing with an array of major current world issues, from the serious to the seriously frivolous: international smoking trends, the weapons trade, transportation, water wars, and the hegemony of corporate coffee and the big American burger. See maps.



They were developed for the International Networks Archive by Jonathan Harris of Number 27.



They also have a link to the fantastically useful Threat-o-meter.



Thanks to Worldchanging.org for the link.



Also, check out the reflective mirror of our media: 10 x 10. How it works:

Every hour, 10x10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour's most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10x10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input.

It even caught the attention of Fast Company.