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Category: Online Applications

• Build Online Visualization for Free with Tableau Public

  Posted Feb 16, 2010 to Online Applications, Statistical Visualization / 23 comments

  

  Tableau Software, popular for making data more accessible, mainly in the business sector, just opened up with Tableau Public. The application is similar in spirit to other online data applications like Many Eyes and Swivel. It lets you share data and visualizations online. However, Tableau Public doesn't have a central portal or a place to browse data. Rather it's focused on letting you explore data and stitch modules together on your desktop and then embed your findings on a website or blog.
  Continue Reading

• Build Statistical Graphics Online With ggplot2

  Posted Dec 22, 2009 to Online Applications, Statistical Visualization / 5 comments

  

  Statisticians are generally behind the times when it comes to online applications. There are a lot out-dated Java applets and really rough attempts at getting R, a statistical computing environment, in some useful form through a browser. So imagine my surprise when I tried this tool by Jeroen Ooms, a visiting scholar at UCLA Statistics.

  It actually works pretty well, and for a prototype, it isn't half bad.
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• Nebul.us Shows You Your Activity on the Web

  Posted Dec 8, 2009 to Online Applications, Self-surveillance / 20 comments

  

  Nebul.us is an online application, currently in private beta, that aggregates and visualizes your online activity. Enter your information for Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc and install a plugin in Firefox to record your browsing behavior. Get something that looks like the above, sort of a donut-polar area chart hybrid. Nebul.us calls it a cloud.
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• Data Interface Iterations: Designing webtrendmap.com’s Stacks

  Posted Sep 30, 2009 to Artistic Visualization, Online Applications / Add your comment

  

  This is a guest post by Craig Mod, who collaborated with Information Architects, to develop Web Trend Map. The site, which is largely inspired by iA's previous work, lets you curate links with sources you trust. This post describes the multiple iterations and decisions made during the design process.

  Design and development of webtrendmap.com v1.0 took three months. During this period the interaction design and interface underwent countless subtle permutations. What we ended up with is almost totally unlike what we started with. There was a lot of painful iteration. A lot of gut wrenching backtracking.

  Let's drill down and take a look at how we iterated on one key webtrendmap.com visual element: the Stack. Continue Reading

• Compare What Your Senators and Reps are Talking About With Congress Speaks

  Posted Jul 31, 2009 to Miscellaneous Visualization, Online Applications / 10 comments

  

  There's a lot of talking in congressional meetings, but what are your state senators and representatives talking about? Design group Periscopic explores what congress men and women said from 2007 to 2008 in this tongue-in-cheek comparison tool with talking heads. The best part about the tool is that behind the humor is actually something useful.

  Compare word distributions of senators, of states, of a senator to a state, or representatives, so on and so forth. We get breakdowns by gender, number of words spoken, and by state. All data come from public records.

  [via @krees]

• Collect Data About Yourself with Twitter – your.flowingdata is Live

  Posted Jul 15, 2009 to Featured, Online Applications, Projects / 40 comments

  

  your.flowingdata (YFD), a Twitter application that lets you collect data about yourself, is now LIVE!

  I feel like I've been working on this project forever, but it's finally at a place where I think it's ready for human consumption. And unlike the previous version, what you track is completely up to you.

  How to Get Started

  You can start collecting data about yourself in just a few easy steps:

  1. First off, follow @yfd on Twitter.
  2. Second, sign in to your.flowingdata with Twitter.
  3. Once you're logged in to YFD, you'll see a link to a quick start guide. Follow the step-by-step directions and you'll be tweeting data in no time.

  Once you've started tweeting data, it'll take about two minutes (usually less) for your data to appear on YFD. Continue Reading

• Google Fusion Tables Helps You Visualize and Manage Your Data

  Posted Jun 11, 2009 to Online Applications, Statistical Visualization / 2 comments

  

  As the newest release from Google Labs, Fusion Tables is a tool that aims to make your data more accessible.

  Today we're introducing Google Fusion Tables on Labs, an experimental system for data management in the cloud. It draws on the expertise of folks within Google Research who have been studying collaboration, data integration, and user requirements from a variety of domains. Fusion Tables is not a traditional database system focusing on complicated SQL queries and transaction processing. Instead, the focus is on fusing data management and collaboration: merging multiple data sources, discussion of the data, querying, visualization, and Web publishing.

  Google Spreadsheets + phpMyAdmin

  Fusion Tables will feel familiar to those of you who use Google Spreadsheets, but the use is somewhat different.

  Where Spreadsheets is meant to mimic much of the feel of MIcrosoft Excel, Fusion Tables is somewhere in the middle between Excel and database (or at least it hopes to be eventually). You can filter data as well as merge your datasets with others, for example, by country.

  Maybe the best way to describe Fusion Tables is a cross between Google Docs and phpMyAdmin, which is a user interface into a MySQL database.

  Visualization Options

  Probably of most interest are the visualization options. They're what you're used to seeing with line, pie, and bars, all looking very Google-y. The new ones to check out: motion chart and intensity map (above). There's also a regular point mapping option. Again, we've seen these visualizations before, but Fusion Tables is trying to make it easier to use them.

  What do you think of Google's new offering? GIve it a whirl with their sample tables, and come back here and let us know what you think in the comments below.

  [Thanks Andrew, NoodleGei, Oleks, and everyone else...]

• Indieprojector Makes it Easy to Map Your Geographical Data

  Posted May 21, 2009 to Mapping, Online Applications / Add your comment

  

  Axis Maps recently released indieprojector, a new component to indiemapper, their in-development mapping project to "bring traditional cartography into the 21st century." Indieprojector lets you import KML and shapefiles and easily reproject your data into a selection of popular map projections. No longer do you have to live within the bounds of a map that makes Greenland look the same size as Africa. Continue Reading

• Google Adds Search to Public Data

  Posted Apr 28, 2009 to Data Sources, Online Applications / 11 comments

  

  Google announced today that they have made a small subset of public datasets searchable. Search for unemployment rate and you'll see a thumbnail at the top of the results. Click on it, and you get a the very Google-y chart like the one above, so instead of searching for unemployment rates for multiple years, you can get it all at once.

  

  This is an obvious move for Google as it continues in its efforts to make the world and all the data in your life searchable. It is still a very limited number of datasets at this point from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and U.S. Census Bureau's Population Division, but I'm sure you can imagine the growth in the coming months. Maybe Google will make some real use out of Gapminder's Trendalyzer that they purchased a couple years back. Whatever happened to the Palimpsest Project?

  Check it out for yourself, or if you're lazy, watch the video:

  Data, Data, Data

  The most exciting part about this isn't the graphs or even the new searchability. It's this growing availability of data. I think most of the data that Google will index is stuff that's already available. You just have to know where to look. The main point here is that there's so much data out there on the Web that Google (and Wolfram?) has found that indexing is now worth their while, and with data.gov on the way, we, as data scientists are in for some exciting times.

  [via ReadWriteWeb]

• A Couple New Looks for Google News

  Posted Apr 27, 2009 to Online Applications, Visualization / 2 comments

  

  The ever popular newsmap (above), a tree map view of Google News, got a facelift a few days weeks ago. Markos Wekamp, the creator, has changed to a rectangularized tree map layout to display headlines more completely, search as you type, and deep linking. Markos also brings the brightness down a notch from that of the original, which I like. It's easier on the eyes.

  Earlier last week, Google released its own alternative news view with News Timeline. The interface lets you search the news, blogs, etc and results are displayed in a timeline format. Show by day, month, year, and decade.

  

  The jury is still out on whether the timeline is an improvement over regular search listings. What do you think? How about versus the New York Times article skimmer?

  [via infosthetics & Google News Blog & Newsmap Blog]

• News at a Glance with New York Times Article Skimmer

  Posted Feb 26, 2009 to Online Applications / 4 comments

  

  The New York Times homepage has a lot of news to report. While well-organized and well-designed, the Times recognizes that there's still room for improvement as seen in their article skimmer prototype:

  Here at The Times, we often hear a common story of usage from our customers: Reading the Sunday Times, spreading out the paper on a table while eating brunch. For many of our customers, this ritual is fundamental to their enjoyment of the weekend, and its absence would be jolting.

  With this in mind, we present an as-yet-unnamed article skimmer. Think of it as an attempt to provide the Sunday Times experience anytime. Of course, there are parts we can’t replicate: the satisfying crinkle of the paper; the circular stain of your coffee; the smell of newsprint.

  Article headlines and snippets are arranged by grid and divided by news categories. Jump to a specific category with the sidebar on the right or browse up and down with the arrow keys on your keyboard. I personally think it makes skimming easier. What do you think?

  [via NYT First Look via Waxy]

• Open Thread: Is Google Latitude Dangerous?

  Posted Feb 12, 2009 to Data Sharing, Discussion, Online Applications / 8 comments

  Google recently released Google Latitude, which is an online application that lets you share your location with online friends:

  Of course when any application shares where you are at any given time, people start to feel like Big Brother is looming in the background ready to sneak up on us from behind a giant bush. Some call it a real danger, but is it really? I put this question out to all of you:

  Is Google Latitude a danger to anyone who uses it?

  My take on things is that people are already doing it anyways, so why not make it easier for those who are interested? Sure, if some stalker got a hold of your location, that could be bad, but that's true for a lot of data... credit card statements, cell phone logs, Twitter... As long as the proper security are put in place, I don't see what all the fuss is about.

• Open Call to Designers: Visualizing Mozilla Community

  Posted Feb 2, 2009 to Online Applications / 1 comment

  The Mozilla group is starting to dig into visualization to participation within the active Mozilla community, and they're looking for some input:

  If you’re a visual designer, data visualization guru, student or just interested in hacking on a cool project, join us to generate concepts and prototypes that build upon the LizardFeeder, a cool feed aggregator released earlier this year by Les Orchard.

  As Les describes it, LizardFeeder brings together and archives different types of activity from across the far reaches of the Mozilla universe and spits them out in a single, dynamic stream. It’s pretty darn cool to watch on its own, but we’d love to further develop a design concept that is approachable, meaningful—or at least entertaining—to virtually anyone who sees it.

  Here's what the Lizard Feeder looks like now:

  

  So basically, there's a whole lot of data waiting for your ideas. Get to it. I am sure you'll get a lot of recognition in the process.

• Tools You Need to Track Energy Consumption – WattzOn

  Posted Jan 12, 2009 to Infographics, Online Applications / 1 comment

  

  "Climate change is a global problem. But it's individuals who will create the solution." This is the WattzOn premise.

  WattzOn is a free online tool to quantify, track, compare and understand the total amount of energy needed to support all of the facets of your lifestyle with the goal of helping you find ways to reduce your personal power consumption.

  Accuracy- and data-wise, I wouldn't say it's anything incredibly special. It's essentially a calculator. Punch in some numbers about stuff like where you live and your travels and you get a rough estimate of your energy use. However, WattzOn puts the numbers into context with some comparisons like you vs number of filled balloons or gallons of oil and you vs the rest of the WattzOn community.

  

  This is essential when it comes to data types that aren't a part of everyday conversation. Again, it's nothing earth shattering - we've seen this before - but still, WattzOn is s a good effort to get people to talk green.

  [Thanks Joseph and Jodi]

• Using Visualization to Optimize Adwords: Time Series Visuals vs the Pivot Table

  Posted Jan 7, 2009 to Online Applications, Software, Statistical Visualization / 6 comments

  

  This is a guest post from Elad Israeli and Roni Floman of SiSense, which specializes in easy-to-use business intelligence.

  Pundits joke that Google Adwords is driving Microsoft Excel sales. Two rivals are vying for domination; yet one's desktop software is used to optimize keywords sold by the other.  The reason is very simple: the Google AdWords interface doesn't support the rigorous analysis of multiple AdWords keywords and their optimization. Importing the Google AdWords data into Excel lets you do just that… albeit within the constraints of Excel.

  Let's try to explain this by looking at the visualization and business intelligence assumptions behind the Google use case and the Microsoft use case.

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