HN user
Because I use R quite often, and R just doesn't produce graphs that look like that :).
But yes, it's probably possible to draw an uglier version of the visualization. (I know you can draw the individual points on the plane, so drawing lines between points is probably available as well, though I'm not so sure about the great circles part.)
The visualization definitely wasn't done in R. I'm guessing he used Gephi (see, for example, http://gephi.org/2010/map-geocoded-data-with-gephi/).
It's interesting that Bing actually brought in an outside team (Stamen Design) to design (version 2 of?) their maps: http://content.stamen.com/i_like_bing_maps_and_I_cannot_lie
What are ways for someone without access to a Hadoop cluster (and doesn't want to continually pay for, say, Amazon's Elastic Map Reduce) to learn Hadoop/Pig/Hive? I'm a stats/data analysis guy, so I've been wanting to get into big data for a while, but I'm not sure how to progress beyond reading a bunch of tutorials (which I have).
The funny thing is, I was willing to drop out of school to work at one of those Thiel-network companies (I was interning for the summer, and my team wanted me to stay), but they told me they wouldn't hire me full-time without a degree.
I ended up dropping out anyways, but to do something else.
How would you monetize these? Mostly from just adding Adsense to the page? [For example, I'm looking at the geolocation of #hate/#love tags, and the imbored-counter.]