Bill Tancer mines the gold found in search-engine data. I imagine him sitting in front of a computer screen with a massive amount of data starting his day by saying, “OK. What can we learn today?” What he learns is fascinating. From prom dresses to porn to politics, he uses search data to understand and predict consumer behavior. No need to search for this book — just “Click” on the image and get a copy for yourself!
Brad Feld at Technology Review gave Tableau a whirl for some personal data visualization. He used a online beta version to play with some data.
After I played around it with some, the data wizards at Tableau took
over and created the widget that you see above. There are a few
things to note about it:
It is a live exploratory visualization, not a static chart.
You can select workout days, highlight across views to see heart rate,
or filter to different kinds of activities.
This was done with no custom development. Typically interactive
visualizations like this take a lot of custom flash work; with Tableau
anyone can create and publish an interactive visualization with drag
& drop ease.
Tableau’s vision with this product is to set data free on the
web. They want to make real data, no charts, accessible to people so
they can question conclusions and offer their own analysis.
The visualization above is static but on Feld’s blog, they are interactive. So check it out and tell him I sent you!
While poking around TED yesterday, I was surprised to notice that the standard five star video rating system had disappeared. (I’ve been watching TED videos on my iPod Touch instead of the web-site all year so the stars may have left awhile back.) After finishing the video, I clicked rate and the following popped up:
On this screen you have three clicks to use any way that you’d like. You can spread them across three different items, load them all up on one item or use less that all three. When finished, a heat map is displayed which I found more valuable than the typical star graph. In fact, I noticed that those same terms were used in the description of the video. Very clever!
About ten years ago I collaborated with Mark Peck (currently president/CEO of ApexxGroup, LLC) on visual representation of customer buying behavior analysis. At the time we thought we were pretty clever since we were able to make effective use of bubble charts to compare changes in customer retention, defection and overall value at a decile-by-decile basis. Our clients loved the work since it reduced large tables of mind-numbing numbers to simple graphics that focused attention on the critical patterns. On limitation of our charts is that they only compared two years of data so it was difficult to show changes over longer periods of time.
Today Mark shared this TED video. It’s a few years old but the interactive nature of these relatively standard bubble charts makes for a powerful presentation. Rosling used software created by his affiliate gapminder.org. Though we didn’t have that ten years ago, it now occurs to me that we could have simply used a PowerPoint slide presentation to accomplish a similar effect.
In addition to the great graphics, Rosling is both entertaining and thought provoking. Your thoughts?
Source: TED: Hans Rosling shows the best stats you’ve ever seen, Feb, 2006
I just stumbled on a great article published at The McKinsey Quarterly earlier this year. In it, Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, urges executives to sharpen their understanding of analytics and the relationship between technology and innovation. Buried in the article was this quote:
I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians.
People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that
computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s? The
ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it,
to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate
it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next
decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational
level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college
kids. Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous
data. So the complimentary scarce factor is the ability to understand
that data and extract value from it.
What better way to start the month than to immerse yourself in some excellent data visualizations. webdesigner depot has assembled 50 Great Examples of Data Visualzations including Narratives 2.0 visualization of Beethoven’s 5th.
I’m a bit behind sharing my recent reading list so I’ll try to spend some time over the next few weeks providing some recommendations.
While poking around TED yesterday, I was surprised to notice that the standard five star video rating system had disappeared. (I’ve been watching TED videos on my iPod Touch instead of the web-site all year so the stars may have left awhile back.) After finishing the video, I clicked rate and the following popped up:
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