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Thursday, August 28
Flickr's Burning Man Map Uses Open Street Map
by
Tom Johnson
on Thu 28 Aug 2008 10:00 AM MDT
Brady Forrest, at O'Reilly's Radar, tips us to an interesting mash-up of Flickr, Open Street Map and the Burning Man festival. Why not use this idea for local festivals -- fairs, classic car rallies, an introduction to a new shopping center?
Flickr's Burning Man Map Uses Open Street Map
Posted: 26 Aug 2008 07:38 PM CDT
Flickr is best known for its photo-sharing, but increasingly its most innovative work is coming from its geo-developers (Radar post). Yesterday they announced the addition of a street-level map of Black Rock City so that we can view geotagged Burning Man photos. Flickr got the mapping data via Open Street Map's collaboration with Burning Man.
Flickr uses Yahoo! Maps for most of their mapping (and fine maps they are). The underlying data for them is primarily provided by NAVTEQ.
NAVTEQ's process can take months to update their customers' mapping
data servers. For a city like Burning Man that only exists for a week
every year that process won't work. However, an open data project like
Open Street Map can map that type of city. To the right you can see
what Yahoo's map currently looks like.
This isn't the first time Flickr has used OSM's data. They also used it to supplement their maps in time for the Beijing Olympics. I wonder if Yahoo! Maps will consider using OSM data so that their sister site doesn't continue to outshine them (view Beijing on Yahoo Maps vs. Flickr's Map to see what I mean). OSM's data is Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0.
In other geo-Flickr news they have added
KML and GeoRSS to their API. This means that you can subscribe to
Flickr API calls in your feed reader or Google Earth. (Thanks for the
tip on this Niall)
If you want to get more insight into Flickr's geo-thinking watch their talk from the Where 2.0 2008
conference after the jump.
Wednesday, August 27
Dynamic charts and graphs on your web site
by
Tom Johnson
on Wed 27 Aug 2008 05:44 PM MDT
A new Web 2.0 tool came across our desk today. Widgenie supplies a basic, but effective way to quickly get some elementary dataviz images up on your page(s). Note, however, if you go to the demo page there will be three or four different links for tutorials. They are all the same content. Lets hope these guys give us more riches soon. In the meantime, "MrExcel" gives a slightly richer tutorial on his site here.
Widgenie empowers everyone, from bloggers to business people, to
quickly visualize data and share it in many different ways. Now you can
publish data in the places you already know and love, places like
iGoogle, Facebook, WordPress, and even your own website. We combine all
the power of an enterprise-level business intelligence platform and
provide it in a convenient Web 2.0 widget.
It's simple to get started, all you need is the Internet, a browser and an understanding of your needs. Are you:
- A blogger who wants to make their latest poll data pop right off the page?
- A marketing rep who needs to share sales figures without waiting for IT?
- A Sales manager who wants his team to update their own client data?
- A soccer coach who needs an easier way to display the most recent stats?
If so, then widgenie is the service for you. With just a quick rub of
the lamp, all your data can easily be visualized and shared with
everyone who needs it. Best of all, you can do it all by yourself! And it's free! |
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Widgenie makes it easy to create a widget out of any data including:
- Excel spreadsheets
- CSV files
- Data feeds from our data partners learn more
Widgenie's
one-click upload process makes it easy to upload your data to our
service. Once the data is here, widgenie allows you to customize your
data to only display the columns and fields you want to see. Best of
all, when your data changes, it's easy to re-upload your data so all of
your widgets will have the latest information in real-time. |
Monday, August 18
Finally, real timelines are starting to come online
by
Tom Johnson
on Mon 18 Aug 2008 10:18 PM MDT
We've been pushing to get news sites to appreciate -- and employ -- the value of developing timelines for a couple years now (and have the rejected grant proposals to show for it). But thanks to Nathan at FlowingData, we now have an example of what's at hand.
Tell Stories With Interactive Timelines from Dipity
Timelines, much like calendars, can be used to show changes over time
in a straightforward way. When you have a bunch of events that occurred
at certain times, mark them on a timeline, and you quickly get a sense
of what's going on. Take the timeline of 10 largest data breaches for example. You see breaches get more dense as time goes by.
Wrap this idea into web application form, and you get Dippity. There have been similar timeline
applications, but Dippity does it a bit better with a primary focus on
telling stories with timelines and a good interface. Zoom in, zoom out,
drag, and get alternative views as flipbook, list, and map.
Below is a little bit of context to my gas price chart. Check out the full version for a better idea of what Dippity offers.
[Thanks, Canna]
Monday, August 11
A bit of creative Analytic Journalism, Oprah-wise
by
Tom Johnson
on Mon 11 Aug 2008 03:34 PM MDT
The NYTimes moves an interesting short today describing how a couple of economists did some creative analysis suggesting that Oprah was worth a million-plus primary votes for Obama.
MEDIA TALK
Endorsement From Winfrey Quantified: A Million Votes
By BRIAN STELTER
Published: August 10, 2008
Presidential candidates make the most of celebrity supporters, showing
them off in television ads and propping them on podiums to stand and
wave. No doubt Mike Huckabee’s aborted campaign for the Republican nomination got some sort of bump from those commercials of him with Chuck Norris, right?
Or maybe not. Politicians and pundits routinely claim that celebrity
endorsements have little sway on voters, and two economists set out
recently to test the premise. What they found was that at least one
celebrity does hold influence in the voting booth: Oprah Winfrey.
The economists, Craig Garthwaite and Timothy Moore of the University of Maryland, College Park, contend that Ms. Winfrey’s endorsement of Barack Obama last year gave
him a boost of about one million votes in the primaries and caucuses.
Their conclusions were based partly on a county-by-county analysis of
subscriptions to O: The Oprah Magazine and sales figures for books that
were included in her book club.
Those data points were cross-referenced with the votes cast for Mr.
Obama in various polling precincts. The results showed a correlation
between magazine sales and the vote share obtained by Mr. Obama, and
extrapolated an effect of 1,015,559 votes.
“We think people take political information from all sorts of sources
in their daily life,” Mr. Moore said in an e-mail message, “and for
some people Oprah is clearly one of them.”
In their as-yet-unpublished research paper on the topic, the economists
trace celebrity endorsements back to the 1920 campaign of Warren
Harding (who had Al Jolson, Lillian Russell and Douglas Fairbanks in his corner), and call Ms. Winfrey “a celebrity of nearly unparalleled influence.”
The economists did not, however, look at how Ms. Winfrey’s endorsement
of Mr. Obama may have affected her own popularity. A number of people —
women in particular — were angry that Ms. Winfrey threw her first-ever
political endorsement to a man rather than his female opponent.
The research did not try to measure the influence of other stars’
endorsements; for instance, no similar measures were available for
Obama supporters like the actress Jessica Alba or Pete Wentz of the
band Fall Out Boy. “If a celebrity endorsement is ever going to have an
empirically identifiable audience, then it is likely to be hers,” the
researchers said of Ms. Winfrey. Sorry, Chuck Norris.
Monday, August 4
Time to buy more storage capacity
by
Tom Johnson
on Mon 04 Aug 2008 01:09 AM MDT
Joe Francica and the other good folks at Directions Magazine and their "All Points Blog" just moved an interesting story headlined below. No doubt this will call for some tweaking of projections and a ton of storage space, depending on your area of interest, but it also bodes well for those arguing about who should have access to the data taxpayers have already paid for.
Sunday, August 3. 2008
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"Speaking at the ESRI UC Senior Executive Summit in San Diego, U.S.
Secretary of the Interior, Dirk Kempthorne, announced that the 35 years
of archived Landsat data will be made available over the web free to
the public by the end of the year. The EROS Data Center (EDC) of the
USGS will be the lead center to implement this initiative. Though not
mentioned specifically, it's likely that some of the data may be
released through EDC's EarthExplorer portal that was a pilot project begun last year for Landsat 7 data.
"Listen to my interview with Secretary Kempthorne and USGS Director Mark
Myers regarding the announcement of the Landsat data and a follow up
questions I asked regarding the USGS's roll in providing policy-makers
information about the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and
offshore drilling."
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