Heat map visualization of sick day trends in Finland with R, ggplot2 and Google Correlate

Inspired by Margintale’s post “ggplot2 Time Series Heatmaps” and Google Flu Trends I decided to use a heat map to visualize sick days logged by HeiaHeia.com Finnish users. I got the data from our database, filtering results by country (Finnish users only) in a tab separated form with the first line as the header. Three columns …

ArcticStartup on Moozement

Ville Vesterinen from Arctic Startup published a nice and encouraging piece on Moozement. The observations on what Moozement is, what it’s most useful for, the current state of development (early stage, but we very much believe we’re onto something), and the direction of future development, very much resonate with our own thinking. There’s also a …

Introducing Moozement

Last year I got involved in the development of a new social network – Moozement. There are plenty of social networks out there, there are even white label social networks. So why create another one?

Jyri Engeström wrote some time ago about the case for object-centered sociality: “‘social networking’ makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people”. I could not agree with him more. The glue of each community is something that unites them – common interest, social object. When you join new social network, you typically start by building your social graph – re-establishing links to the real people you know, checking if they have already registered, inviting those whom you would like to see in the new environment. But there must be something beyond the initial phase of building the social graph. And this is the problem that haunts giants like Facebook and MySpace. You cannot possibly have common interest with everyone, and you don’t want to share the same things with everyone.

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