Data & Stuff // Neil Houston

It’s been a while hasn’t it? Some of you more observant folks will have noticed that I’ve not been in Birmingham that much over the last few months, and instead seem to be a roving traveller across London, Prague and Birmingham.

A schedule that means I’m never sure where I am more than a week in advance, means that I’ve been a bit bad at keeping in touch. I’m sorry for all the meetings, catchups and coffees I’ve meant to have had as of late, it’s just a bit hard to cram everything in (and do nothing some days) when I’m back in Birmingham!

As well as ‘proper’ work, I’ve been kept busy with a few side projects.

• Kitecrowd has grown over the last two months to achieving aroun37,000 unique visitors for each month. Further detailed breakdowns can be seen here. It’s great to see the community grow, and be nurtured by the great moderation team. It’s also doing well at becoming sustainable cost wise, with advertisers coming on board
• YetAnotherGin has been really attracting the traffic, last month it saw over 2,000 unique visitors, a whole 1,000 visitors up from the previous month! There has been some great feedback, interactions with brand PR companies, many a cocktail imbibed too.
• I decided to make a ‘web app’ and created an online spirits, wine, champagne price comparison site: Tipplepicker, it’s still very early days but a lot of the core functionality is there.

I also found out that a talk/proposal for SXSW that I submitted did get through to the ‘PanelPicker’ stage, but alas not in the first draw of items for the schedule (there is the potential it could still go ahead though!). You can read the proposal, as it’s online: ‘Online Communities, Get Them Growing, and Money Making‘.

I don’t know when I’ll be back settled in one place for a more consistant time, but hopefully I will be. After all I’m writing this in a hotel room, on my seventh trip to Prague in four months. It will be great to see the Birmingham faces on a more regular basis, but hey I’ll still be around on Twitter.

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.

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