Data & Stuff // Neil Houston » inspiration

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: 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.