CogBlogged Tagged ‘data’

I’ve been mumbling in twitter (like anyone notices) about a very interesting data gathering/visualizing tool that rides the back coat tails of twitter in a clever way. I’ll spill the beans first, but stick around for the story and the after blog coffee, okay? Your Flowing Data (YFD) is described by its creator, Nathan, as “a Twitter application that lets you collect data about yourself.” but that does not really capture the magic essence. I stumbled here in one of those lovely incidents of web serendipity aka happy accidents. I was being interviewed last week by someone asking about emerging technologies, and I mentioned being interested visualizations of data. We started talking about great sites and tools- I mentioned Information Aesthetics and the interviewer mentioned another site called Flowing Data a blog about “Data and Visualization (subtitle “Strength in Numbers:). It took about one glance and I was subscribing to [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by crabchick There’s something afoot abut data. Whether it is Sir Tim’s vision of a Web of Data (or is it the W3C Linked Data?), there is something emerging with not only the availability of more data (heck even the government is on it http://www.data.gov) but more what we can do with it… Tom Coates was on this early noting that (in 2008 at least) 90% of twitter activity was not at twitter.com web site but through the APIs that allow data (small bits) to flow in and out. It is something I marvel at on a daily basis trying to follow the tracks of Tony Hirst who weaves magic with data. I’m toying with something I hope to blog about i a few days that is prying open a whole pack of neurons for me in terms of “potential for something big and cool [...]

Sometimes it can take months to answer a question; Robert, a colleague I met in Shanghai who teaches at Fudan University asked if I knew of any tools that would make it easy for his journalism students to generate their own mashups of data and maps. I did not have an answer then; I talked about being able to easily annotate maps in Google MyMaps (bit this was a manual process) and other ways of connecting data and maps required a bit more technical chops. Much too late, I do have a better answer now, Geocommons which (sigh, why would any site put a description of their service as a freakin graphic! let me copy paste!): delivers visual analytics through maps; enabling non-technical professionals to view multiple datasets, draw conclusions, make decisions and solve problems without traditional GIS overhead More or less, by clicking, you can select from a library [...]