Data Billboard

These pictures were taken in the foyer of Baidu’s headquarters. Baidu is the most popular Web search-engine in China. (Google is a distant second.)

This is a large status board showing the popularity of search terms across a large swath of East Asia. Popular terms appear and disappear on the maps. Top-ten lists summarise the most popular.

Aggregate data is gathered and presented in real-time. It’s a very thin slice of data, to be sure. But the visitor gets the sense of being connected to a vast network of netizens. As a lobby show-piece, it’s an impressive one. And it’s a great way to show people the overall workings of a business that is not very tangible.

How prevalent will these data billboards be? Will they be relegated to company headquarters to show visitors the mightiness of the enterprise? Or is their a more practical use of presenting data of this sort? Here’s a low-tech status board from a public park in Beijing that strikes me as more useful, even if very imprecise.