Data & Stuff // Neil Houston

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: 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.