The price tag shocked a lot of people, partly because Instagram’s valuation in February 2011 was $20 million with an M, but there is also a large contingent of people who see the service as a novelty. The retro filters and hearts obscure the fact that Instagram is a consumer data gold mine.

Elsewhere and for a measley $200, Matt Richardson has created a device that is a simple illustration of how that sepia toned skyline actually does hold searchable data and maybe why Facebook was willing to pay fifty times Instagram’s previous valuation.

Richardson’s device is the Descriptive Camera. Point, click, and rather than producing an image, the Descriptive Camera prints out a short text description. It uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourced “artificial intelligence” network to produce the text.

The Descriptive Camera is more thought experiment than actual product – it takes five minutes to print each description – but he talks about the possibilities on his website. It’s not hard to see how all of those Instagram photos could be automatically appended with metadata, which Facebook can use to show smarter, more targeted ads.

“As we amass an incredible amount of photos, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage our collections. Imagine if descriptive metadata about each photo could be appended to the image on the fly—information about who is in each photo, what they’re doing, and their environment could become incredibly useful in being able to search, filter, and cross-reference our photo collections. Of course, we don’t yet have the technology that makes this a practical proposition, but the Descriptive Camera explores these possibilities.”

LinkedIn Industry Trends | Ritzholtz | Full Story

OnTheMap is useful for more than work location, however.  It’s a multi-layered mapping tool, with companion data on demographics, earnings, industry characteristics.  We’ve also used it to identify exact metropolitan statistical areas and radius ranges, to find transportation routes, greenspace, and tribal and military lands, and to simply better understand a physical marketplace.

For years, organizations like the Census Bureau relied heavily on point-in-time estimates, tables of statistics and physical and static maps for data exploration like this. As new systems come online, are developed further, and improved over successive versions, our ability to access information from our desktops is not only facilitated but empowered.

The paradigm has traditionally been 1) Data 2) Information 3) Knowledge and 4) Wisdom.  As data sources amass, and become more widely accessible through digital interconnectivity, does the model hold up?  Are the definitions of each of these “levels” evolving? To visualize this model for various applications, what story should we try to tell?  Do the stories below seem relevant (the story of how organization increases, or the story of how data is produced, consumed, then personalized)?  Does the model only serve as an explanatory framework, or can it be applied to strategies for learning; for communications?  It’s interesting to think about these questions, and to consider the evolution of this model, and various visual approaches to its application, over time.

Eric Fischer’s recently-posted Flickr photoset relies on 2000 Census stats and OpenStreetMap data, depicting racial and ethnic divides in a few dozen major American cities. His work was inspired by Bill Rankin’s map of Chicago’s racial and ethnic divides. The visualizations for Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Houston are particularly striking, and most maps feature some explanatory notes through use of mouse-overs.

"Race and Ethnicity - Long Beach" By Eric Fischer

This is great work, and I hope to one day see an update based on 2010 Census data to see, among other things, the changes in concentration of Hispanic-Americans, the differences in post-Katrina New Orleans, and the evolving makeups of Southeastern cities.  This is fascinating data and imagery that really makes one think about what a difference a decade makes.

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Click through and around to assess your home’s energy usage:

I’ve recently come across several organizations and websites that aggregate and track facts.  The Long Now is a foundation that claims as its goal the fostering of long-term thinking (blog), and companies like Ambient Devices offer cool consumer electronic products that are designed to “datacast,” constantly streaming real-time facts that by their nature are always changing, like the weather, the stock market, oil prices, traffic congestion, etc. (They go well beyond kitchen-window digital thermometers, the “Orb” on the right is one of their products.)

But Samuel Arbesman, a research fellow at the Harvard Medical School and associated with the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, started a fascinating website and blog earlier this year that focus on “mesofacts,” facts that change slowly over time, but which are challenging to track. I’ve been checking the blog periodically to see the various charts and subjects they post.

“These slow-changing facts are what I term “mesofacts.” Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. For example, if, as a baby boomer, you learned high school chemistry in 1970, and then, as we all are apt to do, did not take care to brush up on your chemistry periodically, you would not realize that there are 12 new elements in the Periodic Table. Over a tenth of the elements have been discovered since you graduated high school! While this might not affect your daily life, it is astonishing and a bit humbling.” – Excerpt from Boston.com article by Arbesman

I’ve always felt a little challenged by retention of facts. So much of my personal approach to learning has been focused on comprehension and understanding, and pattern recognition, that the details sometimes seem to go, pardon the cliches, “in one ear and out the other,” or are “stuffed into the back of my mind somewhere.”  I can’t remember jokes to save a party, and I’m not even as good at music trivia as my friends expect me to be. I studied International Relations in undergrad, but learned about the UN of the 90s, and the political climate of the post-Cold War world; it’s been challenging keeping up with foreign affairs and the state of international communications over the past ten years.

You don’t have to be a trivia buff, a librarian, or a passionate scholar to appreciate tracking of mesofacts of some kind. We all have our interests and challenges in keeping up with the evolution of knowledge on those topics.  Your focus may be more academic, historic, entertainment, or even outright silly, but do remember to keep thinking and push yourself to keep up!

Note: We’re always seeking comments for our blog posts, but few people actually submit them!  Feel free to tell us about your fact-watching, and especially your sources for keeping up-to-date, in the thread below!

Related article on Wired

By Nikki Graziano