Online Applications

• Magically Reformat Data to Get it How You Need it

  December 12, 2008 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  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]

• Read Your Feeds Like a Newspaper with Tabbloid

  November 20, 2008 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  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]

• Google Visualization API Opens Up

  November 4, 2008 to Online Applications, Statistical Visualization  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  When Google first launched their visualization API, you could only use data that was in Google spreadsheets, which was pretty limiting. Yesterday, Google opened this up, and you can now hook in data from wherever you want. What does that mean? It means that developers now have access to all the visualization API offerings like before, but it's now a lot easier to hook visualization into data applications.

  Headed for Googley Waters

  It also means we're about to see a boom in web applications that look very Googley. Motion charts (above) are going to spread like wildfire and ugly gauges will grace us with their presence. It'll be similar to the Google Maps craze, but not quite as rampant. In a couple months from now, I will have a long list of online places that use the Google visualization API. It's going to be interesting where online visualization goes from here.

  Going back to my original question, to what extent do you think the now-open Google Visualization API will affect visualization on the Web?

  [via ReadWriteWeb]

• Compare Media Coverage of Presidential Candiates with Everymoment Now

  September 15, 2008 to Online Applications, Statistical Visualization  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  I keep stumbling on rants about how media coverage of presidential candidates is uneven, biased, etc. Everymoment Now provides a way to see what's going on with the election from the coverage (and sort of statistical) standpoint. From Craig, the developer of Everymoment:

  In order to limit the scope I've decided to keep the focus (for now) on the 2008 US general election. It's a timely, pertinent and, I believe, quite fascinating topic to study under this sort of data visualization lens. When all is said and done, you'll be able to use this site to look back over the last 100 days leading up to the election and see how the shifts between candidates played out in the media. I think we all have a sense that things may get pretty nasty in the coming weeks. I feel that having a bird's eye, hindsight view of how things went down, which stories the media focused on and how that ultimately influenced the final outcome will be an invaluable resource.

  Check out spikes in coverage of the candidates or even events and locations. Lots of sparklines and lots of bar graphs very nicely organized.
  Continue Reading

• See the World Through SimCity’s Eyes – One Up On OnionMap

  September 10, 2008 to Mapping, Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  Michael comments, "Onionmap is nothing when compared to this Chinese site...They've practically mapped out the entire Shanghai (and quite a few other China cities) in a SimCity-like fashion! Amazing stuff!" He's completely right. Edushi maps Shanghai with great detail. While OnionMap looks like Google Maps with SimCity sprinkles, Edushi is just straight up SimCity.

  Unfortunately my three years of Chinese classes in high school did me no good, and I don't understand a thing on the site. Maybe someone can translate and let us know what Edushi is all about. Chinese CitySearch?

  [Thanks, Michael]

• Keep Track of Presidential Race from Many Perspectives – perspctv

  August 28, 2008 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  Keep track of what's getting reported about the presidential race in somewhat realtime with perspctv. It's a nicely done news dasboard that updates on its own showing updates from CNN, Twitter, and the Blogosphere. It also shows poll results, predictions, daily reach, and search volume.

  They've got charts (above); they've got maps:

  

  they've got timelines:

  

  and they've got widgets:

  In essence, it's a news aggregater, but it's a really good one and a great dashboard for you election junkies.

  [Thanks, Iman]

• Tell Stories With Interactive Timelines from Dipity

  August 18, 2008 to Online Applications, Visualization  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  Timelines, much like calendars, can be used to show changes over time in a straightforward way. When you have a bunch of events that occurred at certain times, mark them on a timeline, and you quickly get a sense of what's going on. Take the timeline of 10 largest data breaches for example. You see breaches get more dense as time goes by.

  Wrap this idea into web application form, and you get Dippity. There have been similar timeline applications, but Dippity does it a bit better with a primary focus on telling stories with timelines and a good interface. Zoom in, zoom out, drag, and get alternative views as flipbook, list, and map.

  Below is a little bit of context to my gas price chart. Check out the full version for a better idea of what Dippity offers. Continue Reading

• Many Eyes Adds Wordle to its Extensive Visualization Toolbox

  August 13, 2008 to Data Art, Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  I'm sure you've seen Wordle by now, which puts an artistic spin on the traditional tag cloud. An application by Jonathan Feinberg, Wordle lets you put any text or RSS/atom feed in as input and get a cloud of words sized by frequency and arranged every which way. Above is a Wordle cloud of the current FlowingData feed.

  Many Eyes recently added Feinberg's visualization to their slew of other visualization tools.

  Wordle marks a departure from the more analytical visualizations on Many Eyes. Why bring a self-described “toy” to a site for social data analysis? People have reported finding value beyond entertainment in creating these word clouds. Teachers have used Wordles in classrooms as conversation catalysts; others have created them to express their identities, and scholars have used them to visualize the output of statistical explorations of texts.

  No doubt Many Eyes, with Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas (who know a thing or two about design) at the helm, recognizes that data visualization isn't always about analytics and exactness. Sometimes visualization is just about getting people to think.

• Google Releases Insights for Search – India Likes Data

  August 6, 2008 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  Google announced Insights for Search yesterday. Think Google Trends but with more information and more useful. Type in some search terms and get the rundown on interest over time based on search volume, regional interest, and related searches. It's geared towards advertisers using AdWords, but it can still be interesting to outsiders.

  For example, I put in a search for data + visualization + design + statistics and got the above. Apparently interest for all of those subjects (i.e. FlowingData) is on the decline and India sure loves its data. I'm packing my bags to India as we speak.

  [via TechCrunch]

• Discover, Share, Publish, Distribute, and Subscribe to Data With blist

  May 12, 2008 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  Today, Kevin Merritt, founder and CEO of blist, provides some background on putting data in the hands of mainstream users.

  blist is not a company of modest ambitions. We want to democratize working with data much as PowerPoint and Visio have empowered mainstream users to create their own presentations and diagrams. Before these breakthroughs in innovation, mainstream users sketched free hand and asked professionals in central resource pools (art departments and engineering departments) to turn drawings into foil transparencies and blueprints.
  Continue Reading

• Your Notes, Snapshots, and Memories Accessible From Everywhere – Evernote

  April 2, 2008 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  I just signed up for an EverNote account, which lets you store all of your notes online from all of your devices - tablet, paper, mobile phone, laptop, PDA.
  Continue Reading

• Facebook Security Upgrade Rendered Useless – Private Photos Leaked

  March 25, 2008 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  Just when you thought it was safe to upload those photos from that wild Friday night to Facebook, this happens:

  A security lapse made it possible for unwelcome strangers to peruse personal photos posted on Facebook Inc.'s popular online hangout, circumventing a recent upgrade to the Web site's privacy controls.

  The dumbest part is how easy it has been all this time to find private photos. All it took was a modified URL with a photo ID to "hack" into Paris Hilton, Mark Zuckerberg, or anyone else's private albums. I don't know the whole story, but given Facebook's excellent reputation, you'd think that they would know better. The security hole has been plugged for now, and I am sure the Facebook group is working hard to make sure there are no other leaky areas.

  This leak probably couldn't have been more poorly timed for Facebook with the release of their new security measures as well as MySpace's not so distant and a bit too familiar photo breach.

  This really makes you wonder - what's next?

  Photo by Meredith Farmer

  [via ReadWriteWeb]
• 

  Putting Analysis Online With StatCrunch and Covariable [Review]

  Are online statistical tools sufficient to analyze our complex datasets?

• Stamen Design Puts Out Another Good One in Digg Pics

  January 8, 2008 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  In the usual fashion that we've come to expect from Stamen Design, Digg Pics shows us what pictures are being dugg as well as provides an opportunity to discover new pictures. As with its Digg Labs siblings, Digg Pics offers three streams -- popular, newly submitted, and all activity.

  I always like to read posts that discuss the experimental phases and how a viz came to whatever it is; it's kind of like when you know the history of a piece of art, you can appreciate it more. Eric goes into the design process at the Stamen blog. There's screenshots of Stamen's experimental layouts, and from what I see on Digg, I'd say everything came together quite nicely.

  The picture streams are split up into Digg categories where the number of times a picture is repeated represents the number of times the picture was recently dugg. The display is clean and smooth, and of course the interaction is quite nice (and useful).

  Another good one, Stamen!

• YouTube Releases Visualization for Related Videos

  December 18, 2007 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  YouTube (or should I say Google), released their visualization for related videos. It's essentially a ball and stick graph without the sticks. The above is a screenshot of the videos related to Marty McFly playing Johnny B. Goode in Back to the Future, the greatest movie of all time.

  Some of the video bubbles that circle around the Marty clip are the same as those in the "Related Videos" section of the usual page while others are not. Place the cursor over a bubble for about two seconds, and related videos for the one you have your mouse over will bubble up.

  I'm not sure if the distance between the bubbles have to do with similarity level. So far it seems not, because I've refreshed the Marty visualization a few times and the bubbles' initial positions have always been different.

  Continue Reading

• Many Eyes Has Embeddable Visualization

  December 13, 2007 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  You used to only be able to get a small thumbnail to "share" the visualization you found or created on Many Eyes (well, outside of taking screenshots and emailing), but Many Eyes just announced the embed feature. In the same way you can embed YouTube videos, you can embed Many Eyes visualizations. This is a really big step forward, because users can share what they've found or seen more easily and as a result, it's more likely others will become drawn in. You know, it's that whole viral marketing thing.

  Just one weird thing. I had to change the single quotes in the copy and paste snippet to double quotes for the embedding to work, because my version (or all versions?) of WordPress escapes the single quotes.

• Google Has a Charting API Too Now

  December 7, 2007 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  Yahoo: Look Google, I've got a Flash charts API now. I make it easier for people to plot their data, and look, pretty colors.

  Google: So what. Look what I've got. I have URL-based chart creation with fun, cartoon-ish Google colors. My API is way easier, and plus, since I'm Google, everyone will use my API and not yours.

  Y: Why are you so mean to me? We both have two O's in our name. Can't we be friends?

  G: No. That's right, you heard me. I'm better. Now kiss my feet.

  Sigh, poor Yahoo. Right after Yahoo released their flash-based charting API, Google proudly announces a super simple charting API of their own. The idea is very straightforward. It all starts with the URL http://chart.apis.google.com/chart and from there

  1. Add parameters to URL
  2. Link to URL as an image

  That's it.

  For example, this URL

  http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=520x225&chd=s:helloWorld&cht=lc&chxt=x,y&

  chxl=0:|Mar|Apr|May|June|July|1:||50+Kb

  gives you

  

  You have the usual options of line, bar, pie, venn, and scatter; and you can change the colors, labels, size, etc.

  With all the charting available, could this be a sign that data is becoming more popular?

  [via Blogoscoped]

• Yahoo Charts Control Library Now Available

  December 6, 2007 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  Yahoo User Interface 2.4.0 was recently released which includes the new YUI Charts Control.

  Josh Tynjala of the Yahoo! Flash Platform team contributes the new YUI Charts Control, a hybrid JavaScript/Flash component that supports bar, line, and pie charts. The Charts Control draws data from the same DataSource Utility that underpins the YUI DataTable Control, making it possible to do combined chart/table visualizations. The Charts Control accepts CSS style information, allowing you to skin the chart itself without touching the underlying .swf file. But if you do want to dig into the Flash side of this project, you can get full access to those assets on the ASTRA site.

  What does this mean? It means that we're probably going to see a lot more hack-ish looking charts online (example above); but we might also see some nice-looking charts since it seems like they're potentially customizable. In any case, it's good to see this. There's some cruddy Flash-based chart libraries that people are actually charging money for. This free and open library should have some positive effects.

• Graphwise: Crawling the Web for Tabulated Data

  November 8, 2007 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  Graphwise launched a few weeks ago, but I'm just hearing about it now, so I guess there hasn't been a whole lot of buzz about this new application.

  The Graphwise group has got a spider crawling the Web for data in HTML data tables and as a result, has accumulated a pretty big data warehouse. There's currently 2,766,560 extracted tables in the Graphwise database. That's pretty good, and I think they're building on a pretty good idea. However, Graphwise advertises itself as three pieces of a three-piece puzzle -- get data, visualize, and share.

  To say the least, the visualize and share portions need work. Here's a visualization from the front page:

  

  I...I...don't know what to say. Why the 3-d bars with the gradient background and the giant, semi-transparent Earth in the foreground blocking everything? It makes me want to throw up. It seriously looks like someone threw up data on the screen -- data vomit. The javascript-enabled graphs seem to be making the browsing experience pretty sluggish too.

  Am I being too harsh? My conscious is yelling at me for calling the graphs regurgitated food.

  OK, OK. So to sum things up -- the data warehousing and Web crawling are great. The spiders are clearly doing their job, so thumbs up for that. As for the visualizations, I, well, uh, it needs work (along with all the other junk that comes with running these types of data-centric applications).

  [via Swivel]

• Create, Share, and Embed Custom Timelines with circaVie

  October 25, 2007 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  Part of the AIM network, it's another online application to create and share timelines. As I've said before, timelines are very intuitive in displaying both data and information, so it's not surprising that these applications are springing up. The circaVie user interface feels a bit easier than xtimeline, and I like circaVie's style and design a lot more too. In particular I like the timeline scrolling; it feels a lot like the iPhone interface. Try it out for yourself using your AIM screenname.