Data & Stuff // Neil Houston » design

Spotted: December 14th – December 30th

Neil H — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 21:16:59 +0000

Spotted: December 14th – December 30th:

UK UX Freelancers Rate Review 2010 – The Inaugural Report | disambiguity –
The Political Power of Social Media | Foreign Affairs – Clay Shirky on The Political Power of Social Media – Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change
http://mashable.com/2010/12/13/facebook-members-visualization/ – Facebook Intern Paul Butler was interested in the locations of friendships, so he decided to create a visualization of Facebook connections around the globe. How local are our friends? Where are the highest concentration of friendships? How do political and geological boundaries affect them?

Spotted: December 5th – December 9th

Neil H — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 22:05:30 +0000

Spotted: December 5th – December 9th:

Network&Society – Redrawing the map of Great Britain from a network of human interactions.

Do regional boundaries defined by governments respect the more natural ways that people interact across space? This paper proposes a novel, fine-grained approach to regional delineation, based on analyzing networks of billions of individual human transactions.
Rank « Gareth Holt – A series of 13 charts and graphs produced with Ben Branagan for the UK traveling exhibition ‘Rank’: Picturing The Social Order 1516 – 2009. Commissioned by curator Alistair Robinson and exhibited at the Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art, Leeds.
http://bokardo.com/archives/the-behavior-youve-designed-for/ – I’ve given a few talks recently and by far and away the one idea that is resonating with people is the idea that the behavior you’re seeing is the behavior you’ve designed for
Metricly – Aggregated Dashboards for Every Business – Dive deep into your data

With your data in one place, Metricly provides a consistent and powerful set of tools to analyze your metrics – with subtotals, rollups, filters, and insights that help you take action.
Muddy – Muddy is an indexing and categorisation tool for use by people and companies with lots of content. Using information derived from Wikipedia, Muddy finds notable people, places and organisations in any webpage,

Spotted: November 7th – November 11th

Neil H — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 16:00:35 +0000

Spotted: November 7th – November 11th:

Misfit Entrepreneurs – Dan Pallotta – Harvard Business Review – He mentioned that in his conversations the thing that stood out most was the willingness of great entrepreneurs to be vulnerable. It's not the first association you'd make with an entrepreneur.
google-refine – Project Hosting on Google Code – Google Refine is a power tool for working with messy data, cleaning it up, transforming it from one format into another, extending it with web services, and linking it to databases like Freebase.
1.0 Is the Loneliest Number — Matt Mullenweg – In that short rapid iteration environment the most important thing isn’t necessarily how perfect code is when you send it out, but how quickly you can revert if you need to so the cost of a mistake is really low, under a minute of brokenness
Symbiote [beta] :: Stylesheet editing that’s almost alien – Need to find CSS of a website? Just use this bookmarklet.
How The Guardian is pioneering data journalism with free tools » Nieman Journalism Lab – The Guardian takes data journalism seriously. They obtain, format, and publish journalistically interesting data sets on their Data Blog, they track transparency initiatives in their searchable index of world government data, and they do original research on data they’ve obtained, such as their amazing in-depth analysis of 90,000 leaked Afghanistan war documents.
Adding Cabbie Know-How to Online Maps – Technology Review – Nobody knows how to get around a city like a taxi driver. A new method for creating online maps taps into that expertise.

Spotted: November 1st – November 5th

Neil H — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 12:00:22 +0000

Spotted: November 1st – November 5th:

The Complete Business Guide To Facebook Deals – Yesterday Facebook changed the game for businesses who maintain physical presences across the country with the release of Facebook Deals. Suddenly, Facebook users have a reason to check-in to places. For those business owners who aren’t clear on what opportunities Facebook Deals provides, here’s a comprehensive guide.
Edge – Serpentine Maps Marathon – A social network mapping arbitration of information and amount of connections between narcotraffickers and public servants in a Mexican Cartel.
Visual Inspiration: 30 Beautiful Web App Site Designs – A web application’s site design is the first look potential users will get before deciding whether or not to sign up for the service; it’s the book cover, table of contents and blurb of a web app that abeyant visitors will scrutinize before deciding to make the jump towards becoming its user.
Starting with Git: Cheat Sheet | Think Vitamin – A handy cheat sheet for using Git.
Making user testing happen « Boagworld – We all know we should be doing more usability testing than we are. Fortunately there are some great tools available to make the job easier.

Spotted: May 6th – May 18th

Neil H — Tue, 18 May 2010 21:01:31 +0000

Spotted: May 6th – May 18th:

5 Interesting Data Articles | blog.infochimps.org – Inspired by Pete Warden’s Five Short Links, we decided we’d put up a post about the most interesting data articles we’ve come across in the recent months.
30Days to context connection – PDF – A 30 day calendar of useful visualisation, and other learning aides.
The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook – A nice segmented chart showing how privacy has chnaged over time on Facebook.
Social circle and content – Google – Google Social Search / Circle
Nicholas Felton’s Master Class – Nicholas Felton's Master Class – Visual notes, interesting insights on how the Annual reports evolved and onto how to create your own data visualisations.

Spotted: April 14th – May 2nd

Neil H — Sun, 02 May 2010 20:02:20 +0000

Spotted: April 14th – May 2nd:

NY Times: Driving Shifts Into Reverse – An interesting visual about driving usuage/mileage, the kicker being the X axis is not displaying time.

Works surprisingly well
960 Grid System – The 960 Grid System is an effort to streamline web development workflow by providing commonly used dimensions, based on a width of 960 pixels. There are two variants: 12 and 16 columns, which can be used separately or in tandem.
TweetCatcha v 1.0 – TweetCatcha seeks to uncover the organic nature of news as it travels through Twitter over time, by examining the movement of NY Times articles through Twitter.
Create cool applications! | dev.twitter.com – New application/dev area for twitter
Follow Finder by Google – Follow Finder analyzes public social graph information (following and follower lists) on Twitter to find people you might want to follow.

Spotted: March 25th – April 14th

Neil H — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 21:02:31 +0000

Spotted: March 25th – April 14th:

@anywhere prototypes from the Guardian – Some interesting prototypes of the @anywhere system, as publically first revealed at SXSW, by the Guardian. Native twitter features, like hovercards, in third party sites. interesting
3D Interfaces – Got a set of data, with complex linked relationships. A demo of a strategy to deal with the connections when displayed in a 3D environment
JESS3 Blog: SXSW Vicarious.ly Visualization – Amazing look at patterns and trends seen when running through location enabled data from SXSW.
Chart Chooser by Juice Analytics: Download Tufte-compliance Excel and PowerPoint charts – Want to create a graph? Not got a copy of Tableau. Take a look at some of the Excel templates, that are presented in a 'nice way'
Graphical perception – learn the fundamentals first | FlowingData – When it comes to visualization, especially on the Web, you have to be open-minded, and you should be willing to try new things. There’s no advancing otherwise. However, before you dive into the advanced stuff – like just about everything in your life – you have to learn the fundamentals before you know when you can break the rules.

Spotted: March 8th – March 25th

Neil H — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 12:12:52 +0000

Spotted: March 8th – March 25th:

Main : Stefanie Posavec – Take a quick look over the site of Stefanie Posavec, some interesting pieces of work are present. Including her cover for the new OK GO album.
LukeW | Web App Masters: Design Lessons from 350 Million – An interesting set of points that Facebook have learnt from over time, with applicable transfer to other peoples sites, including Kitecrowd.
London – South of the River Tube Stations – What if most the tube stations were in south london? This is a nice simple visualisation.
Foursquare Introduces New Tools for Businesses – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com – Foursquare, the location app are rolling out new features to businesses, who will be able to see a range of real-time data about Foursquare usage.
Google – Public Data – The Google Public Data Explorer makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate. As the charts and maps animate over time, the changes in the world become easier to understand. You don't have to be a data expert to navigate between different views, make your own comparisons, and share your findings.

Spotted: February 24th – March 5th

Neil H — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:39:36 +0000

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

Spotted: January 5th – January 18th

Neil H — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 20:10:26 +0000

These are my links for January 5th through January 18th:

Visualisations Applications – A huge resource of services, links and other related visualisations tools.
Redesigning the Boarding Pass – Journal – Boarding Pass / Fail – Showing how a boarding pass could be redesigned, to allow for clearer understanding and conveying of the important information.
Crayon | Luxirare – An interesting mix of food and design.
Andy Huntington Interaction & Sound » Datadecs – For Christmas 2009 the Really Interesting Group wanted to create a a gift comprising a series of 4 unique decorations based on each recipient’s use of the Flickr, Dopplr, Last.fm and Twitter. Having used a couple of the software APIs they were thinking about using (flickr and dopplr) and with experience of rapid prototyping we worked together to turn the data into something physical.
9 Ways to Visualize Proportions – A Guide | FlowingData – A nice post about size, and proportions in graphics.