Data & Stuff

Spotted: February 24th – March 5th:

• LastHistory » Visualizing Last.fm Listening Histories and Personal Streams – LastHistory allows you to analyze music listening histories from Last.fm through an interactive visualization and to explore your own past by combining the music you listened to with your own photos and calendar entries.
• BBC – BBC Internet Blog: A new global visual language for the BBC’s digital services – An interesting look into the way the BBC deal with their Digital branding and site development, to keep everything looking similiar.
• Foodspotting / SXSX 2010 FREE Food Noms! – Tastespotting are publishing a list of places to find free food suring SXSW – checkout their twitter @sxswfreenoms
• Guardian graphics visualising BBC spending – With all the furore over potential BBC spending cuts, just how much does the 6 Music, and Asian Network radio station really cost – and how much is that of the BBC budget. Just take a look at this simple, but insightful visualisation
• The State of the Internet – JESS3 – The State of the Internet, a video by JESS3 – showing the facts about the online world of the internet
• Information is beautiful: The BBC-O-Gram – An infographic showing the BBC, in all it's disparate ways – and where the money goes. Another good display by the team at The Guardian
• Information is beautiful: 30 examples of creative infography – This is a beautiful set showing how creative an infographic can be, pretty inspiring.
• http://infochimps.org/ – Looking for a dataset, take a look at one of the widest collections of the worlds datasets.
• Oracle 10G – SQL for Modeling – Now it starts getting a bit more complex, I'll write a dummies guide approach. But basically, you are able to 'model' the output of your data, based on a predefined set of rules.
• Oracle 10G – SQL for Analysis and Reporting – Oracle® Database Data Warehousing Guide – SQL For Analysis and Reporting.
  So we are all aware of the plain, Select, From, Where etc. But how about the advanced analytics. Worth a read through, to extend those SQL Skills

A lot of people are aware of what Twitter is like as a service, but what do we know about how it looks like internally? Apart from the fact that it has a nice plush office

I’ve always been interested in ‘Where Twitter Might Go’ – both from their infrastructure, staffing and the future products/services they may be rolling out. Thanks to Twitter opening up a job site, we can get a picture as to what they are planning to do in the future.

The obvious is regarding monetisation, it’s taken a while but there are now ‘official’ rumours that some form of an ‘ad platform’ will be launched at SXSWi next month where Evan Williams, the Twitter CEO will be one of the Keynote speakers.

This is backed up, by the fact they are actively recruiting for product marketing, and software engineers to work on monetisation.

What’s more interesting, to me, is the other jobs on offer. Especially regarding data analysts, and data visualisation. Just recently Twitter mentioned that the twittersphere are tweeting at a rate of 50,000 times a day.

That’s a lot of data being put out there, a lot of opportunity for text semantics, trend analysis, and harvesting the information. Which makes sense for Twitter to be after data analysts etc. Though the fact they are actively moving into the visualisation market is interesting. Below is a visual they made at the time of the Superbowl, tracking both mentions of the Superbowl, and contextual analysis around the brands being mentioned.

To me, the combination of their active recruitment in these two areas is an indicator that they may be releasing in the future, a tool that allows for the contextual and semantic analysis of Your Brand, they are slowly rolling out corporate tools (like being able to say who a Tweet was attributed to without having to use ^NH etc)

Who knows what the future might look like, I’ve got my ideas, and got my own side projects!

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