I've always thought of Flickr as a place where I can share my photos with friends and family; however, I'm starting to see there's a whole lot more than that. It's a great place to find inspiration for infographics and visualizations or to just browse the giganto collection of work from others.

Here are some awesome data-related Flickr groups that are worth a look.

Info Graphics

"Charts, graphs, facts - anything that is about information or visualising information" [link]

Guardian Datastore

"Take our data, mash it up and create great visualisations with it - then post them on here" [link]

maps and charts

"If you have some interesting Map or Chart images to add to this group please do so... with that being said, not all maps and charts are pretty, and I intend on being pretty hardcore about what sits in the pool..." [link]

WebOps Visualizations

"Lovely, delicious data porn." [link]

Diagram Diaries

"Diagrams are interesting representations of reality and data." [link]

Cool Data Visualization Techniques

"Coolness, aesthetics and efficacy of visual representation methods." [link]

FlowingData

Naturally, I started a group for FlowingData too. Be sure to join and then send your stuff to the FlowingData group pool, especially if you'd like to get your stuff featured here. I'll be keeping an eye on this one. [link]

Do you know of any other worthwhile Flickr groups? Let us know in the comments.

FlowingPrints - Get cool data prints, spread awareness, and support data.

Like it or not, Google Maps mashups continue to be a Web favorite. It's just so easy to use. Stick a few lines of javascript in your web page, and voila, you've got an interactive map. That's for point-wise data though. It gets a little trickier beyond "you are here" pointers. Cartographic.js, in its first release, aims to make thematic mapping with the Google Maps API easier.

The above is a bubble map for Twitter user locations, and below is a simple choropleth demo.

There's nothing earth-shattering here, but the above only required a couple lines of code, which I think is something every developer likes to hear.

FlowingPrints - Get cool data prints, spread awareness, and support data.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the most recent unemployment numbers last week. Things aren't looking good for the unemployed, I'm afraid.

I showed my younger sister the maps. Her response: "It looks like the country is bleeding."

While the recession is "over" the unemployment rate rose to 9.8% in September from 9.7% in August. That's 214,000 more people who are jobless in the United States. The last time unemployment was this high was back in June 1983 when it was 10.1%.

Check out the more detailed view here:

From 2004 to 2007, unemployment was actually decreasing, but things went sour in 2008, and we've been trying to bounce back ever since.

FlowingPrints - Get cool data prints, spread awareness, and support data.

Popular nerd comic xckd takes a look at character interactions over time in Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Jurassic Park, 12 Angry Men, and Primer. The horizontal axis is time and the vertical axis indicates which characters are together at any given time. The result is something that looks like famed Minard graphic. Well, sort of. And of course it's all hand drawn, which adds to the nerd-ish charm.

[Thanks, Wesley & Dave & Everyone else]

FlowingPrints - Get cool data prints, spread awareness, and support data.

Just a quick note. There's an article up on CNN right now by Manav Tanneeru about the growth of visualization: A new way of looking at the world.

There's a blurb in there about your.flowingdata, but mainly read it for the other sources. There's some nice tidbits from Martin Wattenberg, Ben Fry, et. al. Thanks, Manav for including me.

FlowingPrints - Get cool data prints, spread awareness, and support data.

We all know (or at least should know) about the pay gap between men and women in the workplace. This graphic from Shakeup Media was made to highlight that gap by comparing two cities in the UK at opposite ends of the spectrum. In one city women are paid way less than men while in the other, women are actually paid a tad more.

The aesthetic is nice and the subject matter is important. I also like the use of the Easy Tooltip jQuery plugin.

I just wish there was more focus on the actual pay gap. Instead it was more of an exercise in displaying demographics of two cities, where each section is separate from the other. Some annotation in the tooltips about the cities' differing demographics would have tied things together nicely.

[Thanks, Ryan]

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It's hard for us, cognitively speaking, to imagine things that are really really big or really really small, so we need things to put things in perspective.

For example: how big is a skin cell? I could tell you it's 30 micrometers, but that doesn't do you any good. In this interactive from the Genetic Science Learning Center of the University of Utah, we get perspective. The above is the start view with a coffee bean. Zoom in, and you get a much better idea of what 30 micrometers looks like.

We've seen this before with money, the Web, planets, hard drive memory, etc but the zoom for this case works really well. The scale legend in the top left is also a good touch.

[Thanks, Joe]

FlowingPrints - Get cool data prints, spread awareness, and support data.

So why do you read FlowingData? Punch in your answer in the poll below.

FlowingPrints - Get cool data prints, spread awareness, and support data.

Andy Woodruff from Cartogrammar uses average color in Flickr photos to map the colors that people take the most pictures of. The above for example, shows the common colors of Harvard Square. Why all the red? It's because there's so many brick buildings.

So in the end is a map that provides a different geographic view of what we're used to seeing. We're used to seeing the aerials or the designer-defined color coding of roads and land. This however, while portrayed as a view from above, is what people are seeing on the ground.

FlowingPrints - Get cool data prints, spread awareness, and support data.

You know the Roomba from iRobot? It's the robot vacuum cleaner that is supposed to do the work on its own so that you don't have to. I've seen video of the thing picking up dirt and junk but I've always been skeptical that it would cover all areas.

Well the above, from Signal Theorist, is the Roomba coverage over a half an hour. A camera was setup, the lights were turned off, and the above is a long exposure shot of the Roomba's path. Not bad huh?

[via Simple Complexity]

FlowingPrints - Get cool data prints, spread awareness, and support data.