Data & Stuff // Neil Houston » google

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: 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: 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: May 3rd – May 5th

Neil H — Wed, 05 May 2010 13:08:48 +0000

Spotted: May 3rd – May 5th:

Google – General Elections 2010 – From Google, some good coverage of UK websites (Openly Local etc). Britain is going to the polls, and the internet is a great resource to help you make your decision. Quickly find out your MP and candidates below, with links to their blogs and Twitter pages. Then explore further, with fun and interesting election sites from around the web.
Magazine Preview – The Data-Driven Life – NYTimes.com – An interesting look at people who track their life in great detail.
About – trst.me – trst.me measures user reputation in a way far more robust than counting the number of followers. The basic idea is to look at how many people interact with you and give you their attention, weighted by how many people interact and pay attention to them
Eddy – Stame Design – Eddy is a media aggregation platform built for the public display of up-to-the-minute activity on realtime services like Twitter. It was used by Stamen to curate the NBC Olympic coverage, pretty interesting.
What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News Media? – WWW’10 – Research into Twitter, based off crawling the user network and looking at relationships. Touching on the thoughts of influence.

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 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.