Facebook Friend Activity Seen Around the World

Palantir, by Jack Lindamood, Kevin Der, and Dan Weatherford of Facebook, visualizes friend activity on Facebook. The three "hacked" together Palantir at Facebook's recent Hackathon, but I'd never guess that …

US Oil Doesn’t Come From Where You Think it Does

Where do you think the US imports the most oil from? Most of us would probably say somewhere in the Middle East, but Jon Udell does some number crunching and …

Using Data Visualization to Forecast Financial Markets

This is a guest post by Simit Patel of InformedTrades, which offers free advice on trading stocks. While many investors use economic and fundamental factors to identify investment opportunities -- …

Cotton Picking Correlates to President Picking

The U.S. election is over. The post-election analyses begin. The above map shows presidential voting at the county level. The more red a county is, the stronger the support for …

Mmm, Chocolate Pie… Chart

In the spirit of turning pie charts into food, Mary and Matt kick it up a notch with some design and 5.5 ounces of chocolate. It's a chocolate pie chart …

Word Portraits of Famous People - Einstein and Ginger the Cockapoo

Jeff Clark of Neoformix has been doing some cool stuff with words lately. Above is a word portrait of Albert Einstein looking very chipper. Einstein's entire face is composed of …

Minority Report Physical Interface in Real Life - Oblong g-speak

Remember the awesome interface in Minority Report? You know, the one where Tom Cruise is sifting through files and information as if he were directing a symphony? Oblong, whose co-founder …

Open Thread: I Don’t Care About the Data…

Martin briefly discusses a presentation at a recent visualization workshop. The speaker blurts, "I don't care about the data, I am just interested in the method." This begs the question …

Alternative to Cartograms Using Transparency

The thing about cartograms is that it's hard to make out what you're seeing. You lose most sense of geography and size comparison is near impossible. They're more of a …

Google Uses Search Terms to Predict Flu Activity

In Google Flu Trends, Google uses related searches to predict flu activity in your area "up to two weeks faster than traditional flu surveillance systems." The above graph shows query-based …