Showing posts with label visualisation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label visualisation. Show all posts

Thursday, May 21, 2026

Should I get an attribution here?

I made a timeline of all the people in We Didn't Start the fire when Bridget Bardot passed away. It got popular and put in newspaper stories.


Then three weeks later Nathan Yau makes a timeline of all the people in We Didn't Start the Fire and uses the Bardot passing hook my graph had. But he never mentions my graph 



His graph has a few ideas I am going to take to improve my next version. And Yau wrote the first visualisation book I ever read so I do owe him a lot.



This is my previous post about all the news outlets that took the graph itself and never contacted me.



It is polite to reference 'this idea came from this graph' or to send a message to the originator of an idea and it did not happen in this case.

Friday, January 02, 2026

We Didn't Start the Fire Graph


I made a graph of when people in "We didn't start the fire" were born, did the act referenced in the song and died. Because Bridget Bardot died people found it interesting that only three people. Chubby checker, Bob Dylan and Bernie Goetz remain alive of those mentioned in the song.


The reddit post of the graph got popular and it was picked up by a few online newspapers.



People Magazine, The Poke, the Expressfox news and extra.ie  and the Irish star


Bonus points for a tabloid including my argument about Popperian epistemology in their quotes.

There were a few weird things I found out in this process. 
None of the journalists messaged me. My handle was in the image and you can message the creator of a post on reddit but none did. The poke messaged me when I was one of their 25 funny tweets of the week 4 years ago, so not doing that now about an entire article is a change.

I found a few of the authors of articles email addresses. This is hard now as how to contact a journalist now seems to be hidden. I messaged them a new version of the graph with some fixes in case they want to use that one instead, but none replied.

A fair few of the Articles using my picture I can't see as they are geo-blocked. It is a bit odd that they can take something I made and not talk to me and not let me see they thing they made from it.


and

and




My silly picture is not important. But on a bigger scale huge numbers of silly pictures and jokes have made the internet fun for the last several decades. And in my experience when one of these was yours in the past some amount of credit came back to you. It didn't pay any bills or anything. But it did feel in some way that you putting in an effort was recognised and at least part of a very large group of people making silly stuff to entertain people. If the incentives are now one way, where a news organisation can use something and you can't even see it that seems like the general internet bargain has become skewed.