grey canada’s ‘global mood clock’ displays the time and mood of new york

created by advertising agency grey canada, ‘global mood clocks‘ modernizes the classic display of a row of world clocks, integrating it with data scraped from flickr, google, and twitter to provide instant access to the images and trends of a city.

the unusual clock design depicts the hours as twelve concentric circles. along the outmost ring, a black arrow represents the the minute and a small gray arrow updates the second; the locations of both are interpreted as in traditional analog clocks.

each coloured dot along the clock’s interior represents a flickr photograph taken at that moment, its colour determined by those dominant in the image it represents. a mouseover brings up a thumbnail of the image, while a click opens the larger image and a link to the original.

at the bottom of the screen, text displays the city’s top keyword for alternately twitter and google, each linked to the appropriate aggregator page.

grey canada: global mood clocks the colour of each city’s clock is determined by the latest geo-tagged photo of it that has been uploaded to flickr

although the application involves only simple data scraping, the range of websites sourced provides a dynamic snapshot of a city at any given moment.

the cities presently featured include, in the americas, new york (usa), los angeles (usa), mexico city (mexico), rio de janeiro (brazil), and toronto (canada); and in the rest of the world, london (england), paris (france), tokyo (japan), shanghai (china), moscow (russia), and sydney (australia).

grey canada: global mood clocks left: rendering of the iPhone app, currently in development right: the coloured dots each represent a flickr photo taken at that moment, and can be viewed with a mouseover or click

‘global mood’ is currently available as an adobe air application for mac and pc, and an iPhone app is in development.

video demonstrating the application in use