Yahoo is not what it used to be, but many parts of it are still alive and well. In a follow-up to their email interactive, Yahoo, along with visualization firm Periscopic, explores the popularity of articles that appear on the Yahoo homepage. It’s a visualization that shows activity within the Content Optimization and Relevance Engine (C.O.R.E. for short).

The focus is on the center, which has the same layout as that of the stories on the Yahoo homepage. Story on top, and links to more stories on the bottom. Except in the interactive, you can see demographics of those who viewed the story. The slider on the bottom lets you go back up to 24 hours to see what was hot during each hour.

It gets more fun when you use the buttons on the left and right to view popular stories among age and gender cohorts and button on the right that let you see stories by categories. The rotating particles, each representing a clickable story, in the background provide a final flourish.

Oh, and extra nerd points for HTML5.

[Yahoo]

Data is hot right now, so as you would expect, more people are signing up and applying to learn about it. Quentin Hardy for The New York Times reports.

At North Carolina State, an advanced analytics program lasting 10 months has, since its founding in 2006, placed over 90 percent of its students annually. The average graduate’s starting salary for an entry-level job is $73,000. Its current class of 40 students had 185 applicants, and next year’s applications are already twice that. In 2009, Harvard awarded four undergraduate degrees in statistics. Two graduates went into finance, one to political polling and one became a substitute teacher. There were nine graduates in 2010, 13 last year. They headed into Google, biosciences and Wall Street, as well as Stanford’s literature department.

And in 2011, just about everywhere.

[New York Times via @jsteeleeditor]

Priceonomics takes the association of fixie bikes to hipsters, and creates the Fixie Bike Index. After starting with New York, they branch out to national numbers.

In short, fixed gear bikes = hipsters, and New York boroughs that have more fixies per capita should have more hipsters per capita. We sampled our data to see the number of used bikes for sale per capita in each borough with the term “fixie” or “fixed gear” in the product title to create the Fixie Index.

I don’t know about these numbers. I lived in Modesto for a year and don’t remember people riding bikes — or hipsters, and riding your bike in Los Angeles kind of sucks.

[Priceonomics]

There are a lot of ways to collect your location, whether it’s for journaling and personal reflection or for sharing with others, but it can be tricky making use of your data once it’s stored behind company servers. OpenPaths lets you collect your data via iPhone or their just released Android app.

We inhabit a world where data are being collected about us on a massive scale. These data are being stored, analyzed and monetized primarily by corporations; there is limited agency for the people whom the data actually represent. We believe that people who generate data through their own day-to-day activities should have a right to keep a copy of that data. When people have access to their personal data in a useful format all kinds of new things become possible. We can become better consumers: for example, we can know whether a monthly rail pass makes sense for us, or which data-plan would be most economical for our smartphone usage. More importantly, when our personal data is readily accessible and under our control we can become active collaborators in the quest for solutions to important social problems in areas such as public health, genetics or urban planning.

You can easily view your data in the OpenPaths map interface, or download your data as CSV, JSON, or KML, and do what you want. There’s also an API. Finally, if you choose to, you can contribute your data for researchers, artists, and techonlogists to create their own projects.

I just installed the mobile app. Looking forward to what happens next.

[OpenPaths]

Jonathan Corum for The New York Times examines word usage by President Barack Obama in his State of the Union addresses and the words used by Republican candidates in their debates. Many of you will be happy to know that no word clouds were harmed in the making of this graphic.

[New York Times]

YouTube surpassed the one hour of video uploaded per second threshold recently. To put that rate into perspective, they launched a fun illustration-based site, One Hour Per Second. Big team effort headed by Punk & Butler, illustrations by Alex Eben Meyer, animation by Justin Young, and development by Use All Five.
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Nicolas Rapp and Anne Vandermey with a straightforward look at new jobs added at the top 100 companies to work for, according to Fortune.

Fat paychecks, sweet perks, fun colleagues, and over 70,000 jobs ready to be filled — these employers offer dream workplaces. Like Google, which reclaims the top spot this year to become a three-time champion. Meet this year’s top 100, network with the winners on LinkedIn, and more.

Number of new jobs added or lost is on the horizontal, and number of employees at the start of the year on the vertical. Bubble size represents number of job applicants.

There were 7.6 million applicants to Starbucks last year. That’s insane.

[Nicolas Rapp]

Eric Fischer has mastered the art of making use of geotagged things from social sites like Twitter and Flickr. In his most recent set, Fischer maps connectedness via geotagged tweet density (using Dijkstra’s algorithm). I just got back from Berkeley a few hours ago, so the map of East Bay travels is of most interest to me.

The main implication, as far as I am concerned, being that because of its traditional focus on downtown commuters, BART does not do a very good job of serving the most promising corridor in Berkeley and North Oakland, which would run approximately under San Pablo, University, the UC Berkeley campus, Telegraph, a jog over to College, Broadway, 40th/Linda, Grand, and some sort of route from the Grand-Lake district crossing Park Boulevard to near 14th and Foothill. Some of this, especially at the south end, would be difficult because of topography, but it could probably be approximated. Needless to say, if this were to be constructed, it would have to be pretty much entirely in subway to avoid tearing down the neighborhoods it would intend to serve.

There are also maps for New York and Chicago.

Anyone who uses a social music service like Rdio or last.fm has probably noticed an album’s sudden rise in popularity after certain events. For example, when Amy Winehouse died, her album received exponentially more plays than usual. Other times the increase in plays for a certain artist is simple, like the release of a new album. Last.fm takes a look at these patterns in 2011 through the lens of scrobbles, which is basically how last.fm users log what they’re listening to.

Download the data here [zip file] and have a go yourself.

[Last.fm | Thanks, @dwtkns]