I discovered Google’s Fusionchart by accident.

One of our scientists, who left the company to form his own agrochemical patent-tracking subscription news using Blogspot, used this free javascript-based software to illustrate this rather turgid subject matter. I borrowed his idea and used Fusionchart to illustrate a life science story on Neogen, a diagnostics company.

Life science reporting, like technology reporting, employs unnecessary amount of jargons and uninspiring polysyllabic words, often in passive sentences. This is largely down to bad subbing, bad editing (alas, not many can retell the story of science as well as former Nature editor Pete Wrobel) – and bad story-telling skills.

So often, it is down to the web editors to make the content more palatable to the laymen, although we know more about technology than science. Continue reading →

My iPhone’s gmail is full of messages today.

I hope the ‘lively debate’ is over by now.

Currently, there is a debate going on the NUJ Newmedia email forum. I got inspired to do this Wordle chart. How do I make the word ‘Effing’ big’?

After years writing for both print and web, I decided to express myself in a different way. I’ve done photojournalism for some time now, but I need another form of expression to convey humour in my narration. Photography is cool, but much too refined for lampoons (feel free to disagree with me). Paul pointed me to a few websites on infographics, and I thought: wow, this is cool.

I use Graphjam to teach myself, and the business writers, how to create charts to illustrate business stories. Prof Randy Pausch, that great 3D imaging engineer, said that if you want to teach someone a very difficult computer concept, use a ‘head fake’. Tell him to build a game, not a programming language, and the whole learning process will be a lot easier.