If you've ever created an interactive graphic or anything else that requires that you feed in data, you will love this barebones data conversion tool by Shan Carter. Copy and paste data from Excel, which I feel like I've done a billion times, and then take your pick from Actionscript, JSON, XML, and Ruby. Simple, but a potential time saver. [via]
Online Applications
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Simple data converter from Excel
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Stack Overflow for data geeks
I can't count how many times I've googled a programming-related question and found myself at Stack Overflow, the question and answer site for programmers. MetaOptimize is like a Stack Overflow for data geeks:
You and other data geeks can ask and answer questions on machine learning, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, text analysis, information retrieval, search, data mining, statistical modeling, and data visualization.
Here you can ask and answer questions, comment and vote for the questions of others and their answers. Both questions and answers can be revised and improved. Questions can be tagged with the relevant keywords to simplify future access and organize the accumulated material.
Those with some data munging under their belt might find MetaOptimize useful. If you're a n00b, you might want to stick to the FD forums.
[Thanks, John]
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Facebook users who don’t know they are sharing
I'm pretty sure all this Facebook stuff will blow over soon enough. Most people have changed their privacy settings by now. The rest don't really care. Some people though simply have no clue that what they're sharing with their inner circle is out on display for anyone to see. Openbook uses the Facebook search API to show these users. Search for a term or phrase and see the status updates of public profiles.
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Build Online Visualization for Free with Tableau Public
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.
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Build Statistical Graphics Online With ggplot2
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
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
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
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Compare What Your Senators and Reps are Talking About With Congress Speaks
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]
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Collect Data About Yourself with Twitter – your.flowingdata is Live
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:
- First off, follow @yfd on Twitter.
- Second, sign in to your.flowingdata with Twitter.
- 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
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Google Fusion Tables Helps You Visualize and Manage Your Data
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.
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Indieprojector Makes it Easy to Map Your Geographical Data
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
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Google Adds Search to Public Data
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.
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A Couple New Looks for Google News
The ever popular newsmap (above), a tree map view of Google News, got a facelift a few
daysweeks 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]
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News at a Glance with New York Times Article Skimmer
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]
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Open Thread: Is Google Latitude Dangerous?
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.
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Open Call to Designers: Visualizing Mozilla Community
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.
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Tools You Need to Track Energy Consumption – WattzOn
"Climate change is a global problem. But it's individuals who will create the solution." This is the WattzOn premise.
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Discover Your Future for 2009 – CookieSays Fortunes
First off, happy new year! I'm back from my short hiatus from blogging and school. I trust everyone had a good holiday week. I saw a couple of good movies: Slumdog Millionaire, which was one of the best movies I've seen in a while, and Benjamin Button, which was good, but not as great as Slumdog. I also played a ton of NBA 2K8 on Xbox 360. I'm not much into video games (I really suck), but the plasma HDTV I got for my birthday/Christmas almost makes me feel like I'm in the game.
Rate and Tweet Your Fortune Cookies on CookieSays
During the last few days of break I put together CookieSays. It's a toy Twitter application that lets you tweet fortune cookie fortunes and rate others. The point? Good ol' fashioned fun, of course. I don't know about you, but whenever I crack open a fortune cookie, that little piece of paper never fails to amuse me and everyone else at the table - no matter how ridiculous or incoherent. Now you can share them on CookieSays! Plus, it seemed fitting for the new year and all.
How to Tweet Your Fortunes
It's really simple. Just follow @cookiesays on Twitter and post your fortunes in the following format:
@cookiesays You will make a million dollars tomorrow.
That's it! Your fortune will appear here in about 10 minutes or so. In the meantime, rate other people's fortunes or just sit back and let the fortunes change on their own. Have fun! It was fun making it.
Now - back to work on my more serious project.
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Magically Reformat Data to Get it How You Need it
One of the more painful parts of analysis or visualization is that you have to get the data in a proper format. Real data almost never comes how you want it. Magic/Replace from DabbleDB lets you reformat data via their spreadsheet interface and a few sprinkles of magic. The solution is really quite elegant.You copy and paste CSV or TSV from a spreadsheet and submit. You then see a column editor and a preview window. This is where the magic happens. In the column editor, you can edit a column so that it fits a certain format and Magic/Replace will show you a preview of what the others will look like. For example, say you have a column of phone numbers and they're in the (555) 555-5555 format, but what you really want is 555-555-5555. Change a single row, and voila, Magic/Replace does the rest. It really is "data cleanup for everyone" - not that the data were dirty to begin with.
[Thanks, Jose]
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Read Your Feeds Like a Newspaper with Tabbloid
Tabbloid is a free service that lets you receive your feeds in newsletter, or rather, tabloid form via email at a set time and frequency (as a PDF file). Above is my custom Tabbloid for today. This service won't be for everyone, but sometimes a morning coffee is best spent reading over paper and not hunched over a laptop. I could also see this being useful for travelers.
[Thanks, Tim]
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