Author: admin

Quirky independents survive, soulless megachains go under

Borders has gone the way of Tower Records, Hollywood Video, Virgin Megastore, and Blockbuster, but happily,

“the best locally-owned purveyors of physical media seem to be in better shape than the soulless megachains. San Francisco’s Amoeba Music, Le Video, and Green Apple Books, for instance, are sprawling, wonderfully quirky independents that are still very much with us.”

See Harry McCracken’s “Decline and Fall of Physical Media Retailing: A Timeline” in Technologizer (Feb 17, 2011)

See also New York Magazine’s list of independent bookstores in Manhattan.

Blood on the Street

The patented Map of the Market feature from SmartMoney (this view shows Aug 8, 2011) shows more than 500 stocks at once, in rectangles sized in proportion to their market capitalization, and colored green or red according to latest trading activity, up or down.


The visualization is derived from work done by Prof. Ben Shneiderman and students at the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab on treemap displays.