Data & Stuff // Neil Houston » forthesite

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 12th – November 30th

Neil H — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 23:04:29 +0000

Spotted: November 12th – November 30th:

Extract colors from photos and make color schemes | ColorSuckr – A handy way to choose colour schemes.
SQL injection with raw MD5 hashes (Leet More CTF 2010 injection 300) – cvk | nc -l -p 80 – SQL injection with raw MD5 hashes
CTOvision.com – Disruptive IT – This list reviews the companies regarded as having very high potential to change the way IT is done in large enterprises. It was compiled by Bob Gourley based on personal research. For more on methodologies see the note at the bottom of the list.
BBC – 5 live blog: Radio 5 live and our use of Twitter – Radio5 talking about their use of Twitter to engage with their audience.
Never Wait For The Website To Be Ready – FeverBee – The Online Community Guide – You can spend a lot of time waiting for the platform to be just right. Everything has to look perfect right? …or members wont participate?

Wrong.

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: October 29th – October 31st

Neil H — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 14:00:55 +0000

Spotted: October 29th – October 31st:

Wave 5 the socialisation of brands – report – The fifth yearly 'Wave' report on Social Media, looking particulary at brands.
Making SQL Fast | Use The Index, Luke! – Unlike many other performance tuning resources, Use The Index, Luke avoids unnecessary details about database internals but highlights the one topic that is most often neglected: proper indexing.
Piknik Color Picker – It's a bit sad, but I love this colour picker. Just move your cursor, and find the colour!
Google investing in some eye-popping projects – latimes.com – Self-driving cars, a windmill farm in the middle of the ocean — what is the search giant up to? As with its once-baffling investments in the likes of YouTube, Android and Wave, we'll see.
FundBreak | Crowdfunding creative projects and ideas – If you are familiar with Kickstarter, this is a UK based equivalent to help garner funding for your projects.

Spotted: October 19th – October 25th

Neil H — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 20:00:52 +0000

Spotted: October 19th – October 25th:

Help Me Investigate – anatomy of an investigation | Online Journalism Blog – Paul Bradshaw and Andy Brightwell conducted some research into one of the successful investigations on the crowdsourcing platform Help Me Investigate. This looks at how that investigation worked, and might assist others.
Data-as-a-Service: Factual, InfoChimps & Google Squared: Business Collaboration News « – In 2004, Tim O’Reilly’s famous Web 2.0 manifesto suggested that “data would be the next Intel Inside,” and that any Internet service of significance would be underpinned by specialized datasets, such as Amazon’s product database or Foursquare’s places.
MediaPost Publications Times Offers Details On ‘Metered-Model’ During Earnings Call 10/20/2010 – Meanwhile, the so-called "metered model" will allow readers who are referred from third-party sites such as blogs, social media networks and search engines access to specific content "without triggering the gate, which will preserve NYTimes.com's significant reach and advertising inventory," according to Robinson.
Can Twitter predict the stock market? – A new research study suggests that comments posted on the social networking site Twitter can predict swings in the US Dow Jones market.
Big Money for Companies That Can Analyze Big Data – As data volumes skyrocket, startups looking to take advantage of the opportunity in Big Data need to focus on the art of statistical-learning algorithms, says Michael Driscoll, founder of Dataspora

Spotted: August 26th – October 10th

Neil H — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 20:08:47 +0000

Spotted: August 26th – October 10th:

21 Ruby Tricks You Should Be Using In Your Own Code – Ruby tips and tricks
London, Paris, Seville, Dublin, Washington DC & Rome bike hire docking station maps | Charlotte Gilhooly – Comparing the density of bike hire stations over London, Paris, Seville, Dublin and Washington DC.
PeteSearch: Geodict – an open-source tool for extracting locations from text –
Headers & Footers in LaTeX – How to define headers within a LaTeX document by using Fancyhdr
Do you strip or crunch? A lazy marketer’s guide to social media campaigns – theplan – A deconstruction of a pretend social media campaign, to show why Polo are taking the wrong tact witht their current campaign.

Spotted: May 24th – July 22nd

Neil H — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 09:01:49 +0000

Spotted: May 24th – July 22nd:

http://flowingdata.com/2010/04/12/data-underload-17-famous-movie-quotes-p-2/ – Movie Quotes as Infographics
Social media, BMW and the way forward | litmanlive.co.uk – Social media, BMW and the way forward
Web design birmingham | Web site design west midlands | Branding | Interior design | Design agency birmingham | 383 Project » Such Tweet Sorrow Infographic – Birmingham agency 383 have produced an infographic of the information from the Twitter version of Romeo & Juliet, #SuchTweetSorrow
IRE – Social-network analysis – The next step in data analysis

IRE and NICAR members are beginning to explore the uses of social network analysis for visualizing and diagramming relationships between individuals and businesses and institutions.

This is a new approach for journalists, but other professions have utilized this approach for decades for a wide range of research projects such as analyzing:
iA » Cosmic 140—Final Beta – This time, it’s the 140 most influential people on twitter, sorted by #name #handle #category #influence #activity. Plus: When they started tweeting and what they first said. It took quite some time until we had it in the shape we envisioned.

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.