Every now and then I fall apart…

Bedpost.

Yes, using Bedpost.com you record what is possibly the most personal aspect of your life, your sexual encounters. Luckily, Bedpost offers zero social networking features other than partner logins. It’s private beta at the moment, so you’ll have to stick to logging your conquests in that secret code system you developed in the back of your diary.

I promise you, this is the last of the infographics type posts for a while, but I had to link to this because it’s so cool. Baby Name Brainstorm does just that, it brainstorms the name of your baby with a name search engine that bounces around and provides ’sounds like’ and etymologies and alternates all in a bouncy interactive search engine. Check it out, it’s lots of fun.

Continuing yesterday’s theme is the infographics blog SimpleComplexity, whose name really sums up the goal of these graphics. Some of his visual goodies include the email wars, ‘Jules et Jim’ and the odds of dying.

Flowing Data is a website dedicated to infographics. They cover the latest and greatest productions, for example, the growth of facebook, legal drinking ages, or this social weather map. One of the best infographics I’ve ever seen was an Economist magazine republishing of Charles Joseph Minard’s graphic on Napoleon’s Russian campaign of 1812. The American statistician Edward Tufte calls  it “the best statistical graphic ever drawn”.

This is a video infographic re-telling of Red Riding Hood. If you are unsure what infographics are, I believe that they could be defined as conveying information by means of graphics. Sounds very straightforward, but humanity took one of its largest steps forward by writing (and perhaps even speaking) via pictographs. Written Chinese is still pictogramic in nature, though highly formalised.

I’ve often thought about the hours of work that have gone into communicating important messages though infographics, for example the airplane instruction leaflet that tries to prepare the passenger for every eventually in what is basically a one page comic, or the dance routine of the stewardesses and stewards, designed to convey the most important information and negate any language barrier. The possibilities of mis-reading such infographics provides endless mirth, but on the other hand companies like Apple have worked their hardest to make their OS and hardware as intuitive as possible through the medium of infographics.

You can find further poster infographics at Bachman’s website: WallStats.com, including a superb giant poster detailing the US 2009 budget.