Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

My brother sent this page to me and it's totally cool. Well ... maybe only cool if you're into analytics and data visualization. In some situations, the right visualization can make all the difference. Enjoy.

Gapminder

I'm a big data guy and Gapminder is one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time. If you have twenty minutes, definitely check out this video from the TED 2006 conference. It's a fascinating talk by Hans Rosling on human development trends over the last 40 years. The speaker (and the software) does an amazing job of bringing the data alive. I've never seen anything quite like it. I'd love to give a talk like that sometime. So cool!

We Feel Fine

I came across a cool site today - We Feel Fine - based on an article in the Juice Analytics blog. Here's the concept (more in their mission statement):

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

Give the applet a try. It's pretty fascinating to explore the range of emotions out there - complete with quotes and the ability to drill down into different categories (e.g., show me feelings from August 2006 when it's sunny out for men in their 30's who live in California). Makes you feel not so alone in how you're feeling.