EffectiveUI Releases Discovery Earth Live

Last week Discovery Earth Live, built by co-workers and friends at EffectiveUI. There's a better write up at http://rjria.blogspot.com/.

Anyhow aside from being fun to play with - this is the funnest globe experience I've seen online - this application has the potential to be a nice little educational application. Here's a 'story' I created showing the all the man-made lights on the globe overlayed with yesterday's Nitrogen Dioxide emissions. Of course coincidence doesn't indicate correlation, I just thought they looked cool together. However that fun little exploration experience could trigger some interesting questions and, I'm sure, fuel some heated discussions. Paging Mr. Gore....

Here's the story I created:


Of course, the widget embedded there is fun to play with, but all the 3D gee gaws don't mean a thing if you don't have something useful backing it up. The data is the king here. This is an object lesson to anyone who builds interfaces and experiences. Make things as flashy as you like, but if you don't offer my anything besides a quick deversion, I have no reason to keep using your application.

Hopefully Discovery will keep feeding this application with the data that allows us to explore and discover relationships between events, not just an excuse to play a quick game of "As the world turns".