More sage advice from the master.

“Maybe the reason it seems that price is all your customers care about is…

… that you haven’t given them anything else to care about.” - Seth Godin

Here’s an interesting image: New Zealand from space at night:

No, it’s not a blank image: if you look carefully, there are actually some spots of light. It really highlights how sparsely we New Zealanders are spread across these long islands.

You can make out more detail by looking at the city level. Here’s Auckland’s broad and confident sprawl:

Wellington, by contrast, has a couple of spindly antennae streaking out from a compact head:

In Christchurch, the influence of topography is less marked, but Hagley Park and a great wedge of industrial land show clearly against an otherwise even urban fabric:

The more observant among you may have twigged that I’m actually pulling your leg here: these aren’t satellite images at all. They’re actually based upon 2006 Census data for population density, and are an offshoot of a project I’ve been working on. I’ve inverted the usual light-to-dark colour scheme for thematic mapping, given it a slight “street light” hue and overlaid a touch of Gaussian blur to enhance the glowing effect.

The result may not be the most informative visualisation (there’s no context and no legend), but I think it’s quite an evocative one. I like the sense of floating above the earth at night, unable to distinguish between land and sea, but being acutely aware of humanity in the form of thousands of motes of light merging into gauzy urban clouds. They are still information-rich visualisations (every pixel tells a story), and students of urban form can glean a lot from the comparative shapes of our major cities, but these images are as much about feeling as they are about data.

Scott Berkun (of The art of Project Management and Myths of Innovation) has just posted an essay on how to stay motivated.

Scott is saying that to stay motivate you need know and understand more about what drives you. Then you can use your self-motivational triggers to help motivate yourself.

Its a good essay to get you thinking.

Just in case you interested, In recent weeks I use our Youtube gold awards video to help motivate me. (Go <strike>Rocky</strike> ProjectX ! )

PC World’s list of top products for 2007, has thrown up some interesting selections.

• Numbers: Google has 5 products (including #1), Apple has 6, Microsoft 4,Dell 4, Yahoo 2.
• Pandora is listed as top website
• Notable inclusions, Nintendo Wii, Basecamp, Dell 24″ monitor, Apple TV and Nikon DX40.
• Notable missing form the list are Vista, and Playstation 3.

“When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.” - Henry Ford

“A person who never made a mistake, never tried anything new. “ - Albert Einstein

“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere. “ - Albert Einstein

The full list of winners is now up on the Gold Awards website, but we here at ProjectX always like to think in terms of maps, so here’s a ZoomIn group map that I created to show all the winners and their locations throughout the Wellington region.

Here’s some pictures of ProjectX at the Gold awards.