Video: Interview with the man behind The Web Trend Map

December 10th, 2009By GaijinPotCategory: Uncategorized

The Web Trend Map, designed by Oliver Reichenstein of Information Architects, plots the Internet’s leading brands and services onto the Tokyo Metro map. Displayed in the offices of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, WordPress and CERN, the domains and personalities are positioned according to criteria that judge them based on traffic, revenue, and influence. The team at iA put web services that are closely linked onto the same line and position the most powerful brands in the same place you would find Tokyo’s premier locations. The result is a map that displays ‘a web of associations,’ and as iA put it themselves, ‘some prove provocative, some curious, others ironically accurate.’ We recently met up with Oliver Reichenstein to talk about the map and some of the ideas behind it.

The Web Trend Map Interview from GaijinPot on Vimeo. Learn more about iA…

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wholesale cell phone

so interesting ~
Kleinfeld

Haha, 68.50 USD for a poster!

Jesus Wept.
Webbo

A lot of what people find interesting on the web is arbitary and pointless - that's what makes it fun! Likethe London underground map for example: http://www.anagramtubemap.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/
I'd be interested to know how much traffic you need to get to be classified as viral?
Oliver Reichenstein

When I said "viral" I specifically meant the first not the fourth version. But since we're talking about my "energy and time": Believe it or not. TechCrunch, BoingBoing, FastCompany and Co do that without my intervention. I focus on making it as good as I can. This is how it works on my channel.
Kylin88

Nice to see this "web trend map" and appreciate that he should have spent lots of time and energy. As it's called as "trend", I hope I can see the one for year 2010 coming up very soon! Twitter should be obviously larger than it was.
luobin

Some interesting insight here, I always loved the map
Dennis Hegstad

Wow, amazing to hear that it went viral after his clients spread it around and he only had a little article on his website... ;)

I was under the impression that he spend a massive amount of time and effort over the course of about a year promoting the hell out of this....that's what I was told anyway...

funny how he stutters here...seems like he realizes he needs to be very careful with his word choice here least he contradict himself... listen to the beginning again:

"my uh clients sent it around"..."uh, that got that uh, that uh card...I had a little article online as well so they found that article and spread and spread that article...."

lol

Oliver spent an enormous amount of energy and time promoting his web trend map all over the web...

kudos to him for pulling this off, but shame on him for trying to pass this trying to bullshit us haha
Setsuna

But it's cool.
If it wasn't, it wouldn't have gone viral.
Dennis Hegstad

The problem with this web trend map idea is that it's just too arbitrary and pointless. You could design it thousands of different ways...millions of different ways actually...with the same data because associating a website with a physical location in Tokyo is just completely personal and subjective.

>"It quickly became viral on the internet?"
Might have had something to do with you blogging about it for a year? ;)

"Roppongi has a nice museum"...well so do many other Tokyo districts... this is a great example of the utter arbitrary nature of the design.