Can graphs sometimes be a good format for blog posts?

This evening, I was skimming through some old files and found this diagram I created several years ago and decided to share this graphic.  It was a draft of a blog posting which I had forgotten about and I am only now posting.

This graphic has two parts:

Top branch: 

- An argument describing some of the benefits and disadvantages of using graphs vs. unstructured text in blog posts

Lower branch:

- An example of an argument expressed as a graph

What do you think?  Does this type of format have a place in online media when conciseness and specificity are rarely encountered?

Richard Creamer

2to32minus1@gmail.com

Google+ Follower Count vs. Time

I began informally recording my Google+ follower count in June 2013 when it reached 9,000.  Below, is a plot of these values from 6/13/2013 through 8/1/2015.

Here are some observations:

• The plot is comprised of 2 fairly linear segments

• The slope sharply decreased circa December 2013, likely due to Google engineers tuning their social networking algorithm parameters.  Suddenly, gaining new followers on Google+ became much more difficult.  I call this early period its 'inflationary' period after the inflationary epoch in Cosmology/Big Bang, during which the Google+ team was trying to rapidly increase its user base.

• The slopes are fairly constant in spite of large variations in post frequency and post popularity (one of my posts had almost 300,000 views goo.gl/zOtNZd April 5, 2014, but can you see a jump in the plot?)

#googleplus   #algorithm   #socialnetworking  

Too many pixels = reduced low-light performance

Initial test results are in, and as I feared in an earlier Google+ post (https://goo.gl/RIwBSo), the new 50 MP Canon has less than stellar low-light and signal-to-noise-ratio performance. &nbs p;Also, I am very skeptical that any glass exists which is capable of truly resolving detail to the single pixel level, let alone having the ability to focus great g lass to its maximum sharpness.  Therefore, I don't see any practical reasons for manufacturing such high pixel count cameras, marketing reasons aside.  The only way I can see that high pixel counts may also offer solid low-light performance is for sensor designs which do not use Bayer arrays which inherently waste phot ons and blur detail over approximately a 2x2 pixel area.  On the other hand, if truly great glass were available, and one planned to primarily shoot in bright l ighting conditions, then this camera might be the right choice under these circumstances.

< /span> DxOMark Canon 5DS Results

Wow!  A recent Google+ posting's stats: 

+1's:           1,746
Reshares:   175
Views:        284,796 

Post URL

About Pixels - Display size, resolution, viewing distance and more...

about pixels
considerations on display size, resolution, viewing distance

DISCLAIMER: goo.gl links are no longer valid. Just click slide images to see presentation slides. Sorry.

I've been wanting to write down these thoughts for a long time and finally got the time:)

The presentation on this page (goo.gl/f6IlQF) describes a fundamental way of defining human vision's ability to resolve fine details in displayed images/graphics based upon the pixel subtended angle vs. dpi metric.  Oh, and more... ;-)

Slide titles:

- Human visual acuity
- Minimum point separation
- Computing pixel subtended angle
- Computing ideal screen size
- Ideal screen sizes for various resolutions and pixel angular size
- Comments

Here is a link to the presentation PDF: goo.gl/vylQin

Below are images of the presentation slides (click to enlarge):

Copyright © 2014 Richard Creamer - All Rights Reserved

Google+ Now Offers Topic-Based Browsing

I see that Google+ recently announced topic-based browsing.  This is a good thing, but it only partially fixes half of the problem.

Google+ should allow posting authors to tag their posting with one or more topics.  Furthermore, topic posters should be able to publish a small topic tree of the topics to which they post.  Followers should then be allowed to view this tree and subscribe to different topics (channels) or branches.  This way, followers who want to see photo posts but not programming posts would only see photo posts.  The net result is that followers would have a higher density of interesting posts in their Home streams, and posters would not lose followers by posting content uninteresting to many of their followers.

With Google's NLP and Machine Learning talent, I would think that poster topic category trees could be computed from their historical posts, and that from View and +1 statistics, topics of interest to users/followers could also be computed (recommended to be precise).  So, having people explicitly stating their postings' topics and followers the topics in which they are interested may very well be unnecessary.

Below are some half-baked preliminary ideas I posted in 2011.  If topic trees and follower subscription to tree nodes were implemented, I'm not sure Circles would offer any benefits.  And, the diagram below would be much simpler if the center Circles tree was eliminated.

Copyright © 2011-2014 Richard Creamer - All Rights Reserved

Surprisingly High View Count on Photo Posting Spreadsheet

Okay, it has been about 36 hours since I posted the previous Google+ photo posting statistics spreadsheet so I thought I'd go and take a look at how many views the spreadsheet posting has received.

Well, it turns out it has been viewed 11,679  times!  This raises many interesting questions about the inner workings of Google+.  Here is a screenshot of a snapshot of the view statistics (click on the image for full 1:1 resolution):

By comparison, one of my more popular photo postings receives only about 1,000 views over longer periods.  Since a large fraction of my followers probably added me because of my landscape photography postings, this makes the spreadsheet views statistic quite surprising.  I wish I had access to the attributes of the people who viewed this posting, ideally broken down by company and photography fan vs. techie.