• 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?

• 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?<br />
  <br />
  Wrong. 

• 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

• 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<br />
  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. <br />
  <br />
  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.

• 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.

• NY Times: Driving Shifts Into Reverse – An interesting visual about driving usuage/mileage, the kicker being the X axis is not displaying time. <br />
  <br />
  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.

• @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.

• 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

I’ve always been interested in ‘Where Twitter Might Go’ – both from their infrastructure, staffing and the future products/services they may be rolling out. Thanks to Twitter opening up a job site, we can get a picture as to what they are planning to do in the future.

The obvious is regarding monetisation, it’s taken a while but there are now ‘official’ rumours that some form of an ‘ad platform’ will be launched at SXSWi next month where Evan Williams, the Twitter CEO will be one of the Keynote speakers.

This is backed up, by the fact they are actively recruiting for product marketing, and software engineers to work on monetisation.

What’s more interesting, to me, is the other jobs on offer. Especially regarding data analysts, and data visualisation. Just recently Twitter mentioned that the twittersphere are tweeting at a rate of 50,000 times a day.

That’s a lot of data being put out there, a lot of opportunity for text semantics, trend analysis, and harvesting the information. Which makes sense for Twitter to be after data analysts etc. Though the fact they are actively moving into the visualisation market is interesting. Below is a visual they made at the time of the Superbowl, tracking both mentions of the Superbowl, and contextual analysis around the brands being mentioned.

To me, the combination of their active recruitment in these two areas is an indicator that they may be releasing in the future, a tool that allows for the contextual and semantic analysis of Your Brand, they are slowly rolling out corporate tools (like being able to say who a Tweet was attributed to without having to use ^NH etc)

Who knows what the future might look like, I’ve got my ideas, and got my own side projects!

• Twitter / Working at Twitter – Twitter are after recruiting people to assist with Data Visualisation – just shows a peak into what they may be thinking for the future.
• New car park in illegal parking hotspot | birminghamnewsroom.com – Birmingham City Council announce new parking area in most ticketed street – interesting to note thst a carpark will be in place which will still equal tickets (as per Livery St Carpark, the second most ticketed spot in 2008-2009 in Birmingham)
• An Annual Report on One Man’s Life – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com – The NYTimes talks to Feltron, about his annual life reports.
• Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms – A Gartner report, detailing the players within the Business Intelligence Market. I'm a fan of Tableau, from an analysis and ad-hoc point of view, and they get some good coverage. Alongside other more familiar, and unfamiliar vendors. Worth a scan through.
• Nicholas Felton | Feltron.com – Nicholas Feltron Report for 2009 – His life, as an infographic. Also take a look at the others that have been produced since 2006.