#media140 : Information is Beautiful.
David McCandless (@mccandelish) has a book coming out. He didn’t beat around the bush about that. He showed us the UK and US editions. But he’s also interested in the growing visual literacy of the population through the growth of the web.
If you come into the social space trying to sell something “you’re a bit of a dick, really”. What you can do is bring a gift – interestingness. If you’re interesting, you’ll get followed and you’ll get retweeted. And the most interesting gift is the revealing gift.
(This is a really hard session to liveblog, BTW. It’s all about great, fascinating graphics.)
And I think what he’s showing, and this should be of particular note to journalists, is how limited and uninspired our graphical representation of data is right now, and how illuminating it can be when done right. Asking the real-time web the right questions, and you can find some fascinating information – but give back. Give back into the social space what you create from that data.
Wonderful talk. [Go read his blog](http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/).
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