Terrible examples. He says "Sparklines (...) are small infographics designed to convey large amounts of information "inline" with the text" and then shows a big graph. He then continues "From the general shape the graph, the reader is able to get a sense for the general trend (upwards)" which is absolutely not true. The graph is too wide to see the upwards trend easily and since there are no horizontal guide lines I say most people don't notice it.

There is some news site that embeds tiny sparklines of company's stock history actually inline with the text. That's good use of them.