Still On Infographics
I updated the original post to mention this, but thought it deserved an entry of its own. Yesterday I was digging through my spam comments (to any of you that have tried to leave a comment around here recently and run into trouble, my apologies), while in there I came across a comment from Matt Haughey, the man behind Metafilter (whose infographic originally inspired the post). Anyway, Matt pointed out something that I hadn’t originally noticed: At the bottom of the Metafilter infographic is a link to the Metafilter discussion post where Matt originally posted the link. In that post he makes it clear the thing was tongue-in-cheek, which he explained in his comment as well:
I don’t know if you saw the discussion post on MetaFilter about it, but the format and layout were done purposely as a joke, to mock the overabundance of infographics you see these days. They’re somewhat famous on Digg and Reddit for being heavily linked and discussed things so much that companies (like Mint.com) pay dorks to make dumb infographics about mundane stuff in the hopes of improving their SEO/search engine standing by getting everyone to link to their site.
I run MetaFilter, and we get gamed from time to time by these sleazier infographic traffic attempts, so it was tongue firmly in cheek that I chose to use their method to present a year in review in that format.
I post this for a few two reasons: First, Metafilter, and as an extension Haughey, are something of an internet hero to me, so it was nice to see we were on the same wavelength and second, I felt bad about saying anything negative about Metafilter, so it’s nice to take it back.