Adobe is more than Flash. Heck, before Adobe acquired Macromedia it wasn’t anything approaching Flash.

Don’t get me wrong, Flash is important. How much of online video is distributed via Flash? A significant majority I imagine. Flash is also used for interactive web pages and light gaming. Oh, it’s also developing into a desktop connected-application platform via Flex.

Integrating Omniture (or any other measurement technology) into Flash or Flex, what’s the difference? There largely isn’t one. And Flex desktop apps are proliferating. How valuable will it be for those developers/companies to have a solved, stable integration of analytics into those apps? And of course, since Flash serves SO MUCH of the video content online, how will Adobe’s acquisition apply pressure to the standards that are used to measure video?

Adobe has not one, but two development and publishing platforms (Dreamweaver (ok, who still uses Dreamweaver?) and Cold Fusion)

What if some of the components of Insight and/or Test & Target are integrated directly into Cold Fusion?

What about Shockwave/Director for rich gaming experiences?

In-game analytics don’t really exist, not on a large scale anyway. What if Adobe-ture can solve that?

And of course the standards: Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat.

Holy Crap! Adobe has an end-to-end services & platform suite for developing connected applications, web-sites etc.

With the addition of Omniture to the fold, Adobe can now add adjunct services to their platform.

• Basic Measurement (Site Catalyst), customized for specific environments
• Data Integration & Data Mining (via Discover, Insight, etc)
• Testing & Targeting via –wait for it- Test & Target

And don’t take “adjunct” the wrong way, we all know that the worst kept secret of online is better analysis and synthesis right? The data and the insight they drive are as important as the products/sites/apps that drive the data.

Once you step past the WTF moment, you start to realize that this may be less of an eBay-Skype thing and might just be more of a Google-Applied Semantics kind of thing. It will take careful execution of a well-thought out integration plan but it could be a very interesting play.

What if Adobe dusts off HBX (or offers a trimmed down version of Site Catalyst) for free to publishers (especially video publishers) in return for aggregated and anonymous video usage data? What if they push something like that through partners like BrightCove that provide video players to publishers?

Again, once you move past the shock and think about a bit, this acquisition might just make more sense than you thought, or at least the possible reasons for it begin to emerge.

What do you think? Why did Adobe do this? Why did Josh et. al. agree to it? Are the reasons above worthwhile? Are there other more important factors? Please leave a comment and let me know!

One last random thought, does this help Adobe in positioning against HTML 5? My understanding is limited but it seems to me that the HTML 5 standard is, in some ways, a direct shot at Flash.

BTW, Gary Angel over at SEMPhonic has a very thoughtful post on this deal

Adding a sudo reference line in Tableau from Joe Mako on Vimeo.

NOTE: Joe directed me to his tutorial after I was asking some questions about reference lines on Twitter yesterday, I’m simply passing along his great little tutorial. Please enjoy!

Well, here is your first peek at that project – Tableau Online!

Essentially, it will allow anyone with Tableau Desktop to publish their workbook online and embed the visualization in their website.

Tableau Online is currently in private beta, but you can sign up for updates here, or click on the logo below the visualization.

Before we get to the visualization itself, here’s what I’ve learned about the project from Christian and Ellie Fields – Director of Product Marketing.

Christian says that the vision for Tableau Online is for it to be “the YouTube of information visualization…” which I interpret as the platform of choice for publishing rich, interactive visualizations online.
Additionally, during a recent discussion with Ellie Fields, I uncovered some of the more nitty-gritty details…

1. It currently only works with local data – basically you need an extract from any source locally on your machine in order to use the visualization with Tableau Online (in all likelihood you will upload a packaged workbook)
2. There have been discussions around an API so that data might be transmitted ‘over-the-wire’, but there are no specific plans for getting that done
3. This is a very early look, the hardware is still undergoing performance testing so be patient if you get an error with the visualization or it takes a while to load; and hey, leave a comment describing what happened!

What follows is a proof of concept based on the calendar view I had developed.

This calendar specifically, and Tableau Online generally is built on the new version 5 platform (there have been some examples creeping out on the Tableau blog). I’ve been working with the version 5 beta so let me tell you about the features from 5 that are important here. Sheetlinks and highlights have been repackaged – and improved – to a new function called ‘Actions’. In this visualization, the calendar filter for year is also applied to the small multiples sparklines below the calendar. This is now very easy to do compared to how sheet links work in version 4. Also, if you click on any particular day within the calendar, that date is highlighted on the small multiples below – enabling this is as easy as hitting a switch (which is basically what you do).

Many improvements and new options have been added to quick filters – but, so far, the biggest improvement IMHO is the addition of the search feature! (Although I wish that the Tableau team had built in direct feedback for when a search fails)

Here are some of the things you can do in this proof of concept.

1. Filter on Year for the whole visualization
2. Select a particular month for the calendar view
3. Highlight any given day in both the calendar and the small multiples by selecting a day in the calendar (you can also select multiple days)
4. Highlight a day in the small multiples only by clicking on a plotted point (or drag select multiple days)
5. Highlight a particular month by selecting the month name in the small multiples column header
6. Lowlight inactive days in the calendar for a particular product category by selecting the category name in the small multiples row header (you can select multiple categories by selecting one category and then either SHIFT or CTRL clicking another category)

The Tableau team and I have discussed many changes to this visualization, but we weren’t able to get them done in time for this post as each change currently requires extensive testing on the new platform, but those changes should be coming soon. Discussed changes include changing the color encoding to profit instead of total sales, and doing a daily sparkline only for the currently selected month and then bar charts aggregated by month for the rest of the months in the currently selected year.

What else would you change/remove/add to this visualization?

Finally, there will be a smattering of sneak peeks going up across the infoviz community so keep your eye on out here and the Tableau blog as those new visualizations go up!

I don’t necessarily disagree with Tableau’s argument, but I think they made several errors in how they chose to communicate it.

Error #1: Bad Blogging Etiquette: The post provides no link to the Media Cloud project and the specific item under discussion. There is no native way for the reader to go back to Media Cloud and investigate the visualization on their own. I wasn’t familiar with Media Cloud so I actually had to Google it to get there.

Error #2: Poor Graphic Use: Tableau chose to use just a thumbnail (the same thumbnail that is provided by Media Cloud) of the infographic. Furthermore, they covered it up with their “Viz Police” badge making it impossible to get a decent view of the graphic. Finally, the way they incorporated their badge into the Media Cloud graphic (it looks like someone screen-shot a layered graphic out of Photoshop or similar) presupposes the bad nature of the graphic. In other words, poor execution of including the badge on the Media Cloud graphic gives the reader the, possibly false, impression that the map is a bad graphic.

Error #3: Lack of a Full-Size Graphic: Tableau did not provide a full-sized version of the Media Cloud graphic. Now, I run hi-res (1928×1208) so I’d argue that the original graphic is too small anyway. But, when you look at the full-sized graphic sans “Viz Police” badge, the errors are not quite as egregious as indicated by Tableau. In the full-sized graphic the Area-bias still exists, but it’s clear that the UK is more saturated than the U.S. on the BBC graphic – when you spend some time looking at it.

Error #4: Misdirection. In attempting to show how Tableau’s solution (circles vs. density) is better, they bring in a completely different data set – “Net Internal Migration by State”. Now Media Cloud does not provide the data behind their graphic so if you wanted to create a comparative graphic in another tool you’d presumably have to jump through some hoops to either get them to provide the data or to estimate the data, but in either case you are not comparing apples and steel ingots ( apples & oranges are, in fact, too similar for the old adage to work) as Tableau is asking you to do in their post.

Error #5: Using area to encode value. In an error similar to the map-density one they are arguing against, Tabeau’s example uses the area of the circles to encode some value – which is not even explained via a legend (the legend only explains the color encoding)! For those that may not know, we humans are not good at estimating area, it’s not what our visual systems are built to do. We tend to over-estimate large areas and underestimate small areas – remember, this is the basic argument against pie charts.

Error #6: Chart Junk. At best, chart junk obfuscates your data making it difficult to understand. At worst, it causes bias or error in judgment of the data. Well, in the Tableau map, the circles have a light-colored border. This border is more evident on some of the plot points than others, creating the misrepresentation that those points are somehow more important. Is the migration to Maine somehow more important than the migration to Minnesota? I don’t really know because they are roughly the same size and color BUT the border on the Maine circle is much clearer than the one on Minnesota – what does that mean?

Error #7: Breaking map conventions. I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but here in the U.S. a circle on a map generally means a population center – a city – and the size of that circle may indicate how big the city is, or all circles are the same size (e.g. no value encoded on the area). So, when I’m looking at a map like this I/we expect the circles to reference a city and these circles do not, they reference a state – Tableau has just broken your mental model of a map! When you use a convention unconventionally and break the standard mental model you typically end up creating cognitive dissonance. I’m not saying that it should never be done, but you have to be very careful. If the confusion throws something into sharp relief that might otherwise be obscured, ok you’ve got a case to do it, but if all it does is create a buzzing between the ears that makes processing the information more difficult you are better off not doing it.

So what? Why am I all in a huff? It’s not because I dislike Tableau – quite the opposite, I am an avid user. I do dislike poorly executed arguments. If the argument is not made cogently, it has holes in it. It looks sloppy and therefore is less effective. Tableau has an excellent point about the pitfalls of area-based information graphics but they’ve shot themselves in the foot with how they argue it and that makes it less likely their readers will understand and trust the argument which well might lead them to not using the learning in their design efforts.

To be honest, I find the whole argument a bit disingenuous. The post argues against a specific type of area encoding – density encoding on geographic areas but Tableau not only allows area encoding on plot types up to and including the ignoble pie chart but their geographic visualizations allow density encoding via the data layers.

BTW, this is a follow-on to the comment I posted on Tableau’s blog. I wasn’t particularly happy with my comment so I rewrote it as a post here rather than editing the comment there.

Source: Media Cloud A Harvard Law | Berkman Center Project

Source: Media Cloud a Harvard Law | Berkman Center project

Source: Tableau

One of the simplest things to do is limit the time frame for the report. For instance, maybe the report you’re working on only needs the last 30 days of data or the last 6 months or the last year.

But how do you do this in Tableau?

Beginners, myself included, will just drop the date field of choice onto the filter shelf and manually set the date range required. The problem is that every time you open the report you have to manually adjust your date filter so it’s not helping you as much as it could be.

Enter DATEDIFF. This function – as the name implies – calculates the difference between two dates at a specific granularity. That’s right, it will calculate the difference in dates by number of days, weeks, months, etc. How cool is that?

Ok, so how does that help create a filter that returns only the last N days of data?

It’s so simple you might think the above is a trick question some how.

Before I get started on directions, I’m going to assume that you’re already in your workbook and connected to your data source. For the purpose of this exercise, I’ll be using our friend – SuperStore Data.

1. Start by opening the ‘Create Calculated Field’ dialog box
2. Let’s call this new field ‘30day-Filter’
3. Tab down (or click in) the ‘Formula Field
4. Type in DATEDIFF(
5. The first argument in DATEDIFF is the granularity to calculate with (day, week, month, etc). For our 30day-Filter we’ll use ‘day’
6. So far you should have DATEDIFF('day'
7. Arguments in a function are separated by commas so add a comma after ‘day’
8. The next argument is the start date (e.g. the oldest date) which will be the date from your data source record. In this case, the field we want is ‘Order Date’
9. Our new function should look like this so far: DATEDIFF('day',[Order Date],
10. For the end date, we’re going to use another function – TODAY(). TODAY() takes no arguments and returns the current date from your data source. If you’re connected to a remote data server TODAY() will reflect the date on the server. If you’re working with a local data source (text file, excel, etc) then TODAY() will reflect the time on your local machine
11. So far we have DATEDIFF('day',[Order Date],TODAY()) This is a valid function all by itself and will calculate the difference between the two dates with ‘day’ granularity, but it’s not a filter yet
12. In this case we want a filter that evaluates to ‘TRUE’ or ‘FALSE’ and really, it’s very simple. Just add ‘<=30' to the end of the function
13. DATEDIFF('day',[Order Date],TODAY())<=30
14. Save the calculated metric

notice that in the Dimension shelf your new metric has an icon of T/F. Now we're ready to use the filter! Go ahead and add it to your filter shelf.

A couple of last points on using this filter to make your report dynamic in terms of the date range. Make the filter global - remember the date filter should encompass all of the data you need for the report, and making it global makes it apply to all worksheets automatically. Add the filter to your context - this limits the data Tableau is working with on the server side which should improve the speed of all subsequent queries (less rows to traverse for an answer).

This is an exceptional piece. Beautiful and informative. Make sure to check out Charlene’s post describing the project with more photos.

BTW, see all the contest glory at Information Aesthetics

This a video history of the Internet using Picol icons – what do you think?

We’ve been using Tableau at work for about three months during which I had something of a rare experience (or at least rare to me). Still being a neophyte with Tableau it was surprising to me that building a simple calendar view of data hadn’t occurred to the Tableau team. Purists will argue (and who’s to disagree) that calendars don’t make the best data visualizations (lack of ability to see trends, low data to ink ration, blah blah blah) but when you have a set of users that prefer a calendar AND everyone is already trained to use/read/interpret a calendar, it’s a compromise I can live with.

Long story short, it was easy enough to build the calendar framework in Tableau but I was still new enough to struggle with getting the data into the calendar in the way that I wanted. So, I reached out to the Sales Engineering team at Tableau (Thanks Ty!) and they he helped me out. The surprising part was the mini-storm of attention that this created on the Tableau team. Apparently this type of visualization hadn’t occurred to them and it created some excitement. What follows is a combination of what I learned on my own and what Ty helped me to create.

For this exercise, we’ll be relying on some of the training data that comes along with Tableau – the ’superstore data’.

This post is pretty in-depth (and long) but it assumes that you have a working knowledge of Tableau and SQL. If you are new to either or both, some of this may not make sense.

Set 1: Getting Set Up

1. Open Tableau
2. Start a new workbook
3. Connect to “Sample -Superstore Sales” Excel file

You may see some different dimensions and measures in here than what you see in your workbook. There are two reasons for this, there are a couple of custom dimensions and measures that we need to create along the way AND you may have a different version of this file than I do.

Step 2: Building the Calendar Framework

1. The first thing we need is a custom dimension, not because we’re going to use it right away but we will need it later for building in some interactivity and it’s part of the calendar framework. this dimension will be called “YYMM” and is a simple concatenation of the 2-digit year and 2-digit month from the Order Date dimension.

    

    

    

    

    

   This simple dimension is simple a string and will return values like ‘0801′ (e.g. January 2008)

2. Setting the stage…
   1. Right-mouse click and drag the “Order Date” dimension to the Columns pane. This should prompt you to select the type of aggregation to use – select “WEEKDAY(Order Date)”. This will get you your days of the week running across the top.
   2. Now drag “YYMM” to the Rows pane, followed by “YEAR(Order Date)” (which is the default aggregation for date dimensions), “MONTH(Order Date)” (remember that right-mouse drag?) and “WEEK(Order Date)”

      Right now you have a table that should look something like the following:

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

3. Making the table into a calendar
   1. In the “Marks” pane, change the Marks drop down to “Square”
   2. Make a new custom dimension called “Day” with the formula DAY([Order Date]) (Make sure that day is in the Dimensions pane and not the Measures pan after creating it)
   3. Drag “Day” to the “Level of Detail” box in the “Marks” pane

      Now the Tableau stage probably looks something like this:

      

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

   4. Let’s put in a quick filter so that we can look at just one month, we’ll remove the filter later. Control drag (CTRL+Drag) “YYMM” from the Columns pane to the “Filters” pane. Put a check mark on “Exclude” and then scroll to the end of the list and take the check mark off of “200812″. Now we’re just looking at December 2008. Still doesn’t look like much of a calendar does it? But it’s in there.
   5. We just have to manually adjust the size of the stage and the cells to get what we are looking for.
      1. Find the up/down handle on the Week of Order Date cell and drag it down so that the row height is about 1.5″
      2. Do the same for the Day of Week Columns. We’re now getting closer, you can probably start to see the calendar format:

          

          

          

          

          

          

          

          

      3. Add borders to enhance the calendar effect. Go to Format –> Borders
         1. Add a black, narrow border to Cell under the Default section of the Sheet–>Borders pane
         2. Ass an added bonus you can now fine tune your column width and row height to a square

         Your Tableau stage should now look an awful lot like a calendar, albeit an ugly blank one:

          

          

          

   6.  

       

Step 3: Adding Data and Visual Analysis Cues

So now we have our basic calendar structure but there is no data in it and let’s face it, it’s U-G-L-Y. Let’s start by adding data.

1. For the purpose of this exercise, we’re going to assume that we want to keep track of total sales (Gross Revenue) and Profit. We also need to add the day of the month to each cell. Initially, I had gone down the road of using Tableau annotations to create this but it’s cumbersome and breaks whenever the dates change. So the biggest thing that Ty in Sales Engineering helped me with was a custom measure that contained the Day of the Month, the total Sales and the Profit.
   1. So, we’re going to create a custom measure called “Day Calc” that concatenates the day of the month, the Sales total and the Profit total. The formula looks like this:

      str(MIN(DAY([Order Date])))+”

      s: “+str(round(SUM([Sales]),2))+”
      p: “+str(round(SUM([Profit]),2))

   2. Now, drag “Day Calc” from the Measures pane to the “Text” field in the Marks pane
   3. Right-mouse click a date cell and go to Format. Set the vertical alignment to “Top”. Horizontal alignment is your choice, as long as it’s left or right

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

      Ok, now we have actual data in the calendar, but what’s up with the color? The blue ain’t helping – maybe we should do something about that?

2. Use color as an indicator of health
   1. Drag “Sales” from the Measures pane to the “Color” field on the Marks pane
   2. In the new “Colors” pane that appears below Measures, click the down arrow and select “Edit Colors”
   3. In the new dialog box, change the palette from “Automatic” to “Red-Green Diverging
   4. Put a check on “Stepped Color” and change the number of steps to two (2)

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

      The colors, which are splitting on the average revenue in this scenario, are still quite a bit saturated though.

   5. Change the opacity of the cell colors
      1. Back in the Marks pane, drag the opacity slider under Color to the left to increase the transparency of the color in order to desaturate the display. Find a level you’re happy with it and go!

Step 4: Cleaning It Up

Now we have a calendar that gives us useful information and visual cues to the health of a particular day – hooray! But there is still a lot of stuff chart junk showing that we don’t necessarily need to show.

Things that can probably be hidden (not removed because they are either needed to maintain the calendar framework or we will need them later to create interactivity).

1. YYMM can be hidden
2. Week of Order Date can be hidden

   These two items can be hidden by clicking on the dropdown arrow in their respective lozenges (yes their called lozenges) in the Row shelf and taking the check mark off of “Show Header”

3. Additionally, we can remove the row headers. Right-mouse click on “Order Date” in the stage and select “Hide Field Labels for Columns” – Order Date should disappear. Right-mouse click on either “Year of Order Date” or “Month of Order Date” and select “Hide Field Labels for Rows” and both of those should now be hidden.
4. You may want to resize the Year and Month columns at this point but keep them visible because in the next post we’ll be making this calendar interactive so you want to make sure and indicate which month and year is being viewed
5. VIOLA! A calendar based view in Tableau:

Stay tuned for the next post in this series where we’ll discuss taking this view and making it interactive!

Happy Holidays

Here’s some Excel chart goofiness for your warm and fuzzy holiday season!

From the article:

…As impressive as her statistics were, Nightingale worried that Queen Victoria’s eyes would glaze over as she scanned the tables. So Nightingale devised clever ways of presenting the information in charts. Statistics had been presented using graphics only a few times previously, and perhaps never to persuade people of the need for social change. In doing so, she ignored the express advice of her mentor, Farr. “You complain that your report would be dry,” he wrote to her. “The dryer [sic] the better. Statistics should be the dryest [sic] of all reading.”…

They have what I’m sure is a fun little interactive graphic of her “coxcomb” info-graphics but I’m not sure it’s helpful.

What do you think?

So very exciting! The library of congress is publishing photos on Flickr.

Here’s a screenshot:

Flowing Data

I can see what Heather was attempting to do with the color choices in her table – trying to visually relate each row in her table to the geographic map produced by the NY Times. However, there are a couple of problems with that. First of all, the seemingly bold choices of the colors on the US Map do serve an important purpose – they make each state’s affiliation immediately clear. Secondly, the colors are carefully paired. The pure dark blue of Obama and pure dark red of McCain have the same intensity so that our eyes aren’t tricked into thinking there’s more blue or red than there actually is or that one is more important than the other. The secondary colors appear to be less intense than the pure colors but are also matched in intensity to each other. The yellow of the ‘Tossup’ states are actually visually striking – on purpose I’m sure.

However, when those colors are poorly reproduced in a table what you end up with is a hot mess – visually.

And is it just me or is the choice of dark blue for the column headers awkward? It tends to make me think that the table itself is leaning towards Obama when that’s probably not the intent. As you can see by comparing the table to the map, there was an attempt to relate the states in the map to the rows in the tables by giving them -similar- background colors, however the matching is poor and the table ends up being difficult to read.

On an analytical note, it sure would be nice if the tables provided total % of traffic to each candidate’s site from the top 10 states (easy enough to calculate) as well as the total “Representation Index against online pop” (whoa, that’s a mouthful, couldn’t we just call it Online Index like other audience measurement services and then provide a definition if we feel it’s required?)

Below, are the tables, as I have redesigned them:

In the screen-shot above I included the original NY Times map as reference. As you can see, I’ve removed all the color matching within the rows themselves. Instead, by taking a look at how the colors are applied to the map:

We can see that the groups are easily referenced as a numerical score (-2 to +2):

Not only will this value assignment allow us to clean up the table, but it creates the opportunity to perform some simple operations on the scoring – more on that in a bit. So, as you can see while still containing all the information of the original table, we have cleaned it up quite a bit and hopefully made it more readable. Now, because it’s not a bad idea to make sure that the table data is still easily relatable to all the information in the NY Times map, I went ahead and created legends for the state-scoring column. Oh, and I did take the extra five minutes needed to pop the map into GIMP so I could use the eyedropper tool to get the exact RGB values for each color (a good practice – your eyes can and will fool you).

For easy comparison, here are the two tables:

Original Table by Hitwise

Our Cleaned-Up Table

Now getting back to wishing that Hitwise had provided totals for each of their columns (Traffic Share and Online Index) and what the numerical scoring does for us. Note that we’ve included a “TTL/AVG/TTL” row at the bottom of the new table. The Online Index is averaged because we don’t have access to the raw data needed to compute the actual Online Index for those top 10 sites.

But in any case, we can see that the Obama site traffic dominated by states that are pro-Obama (+5) while the McCain site would appear to be dominated (-7) by pro-Obama traffic as well. That’s interesting and leads to all kinds of questions about the demographic and psychographic makeup of those visitors. Also, the average Online Index for the Obama site is much higher than that for the McCain site. I’m not sure if this indicates that Obama’s traffic is highly concentrated or that McCain’s is more distributed but it certainly begs to be explored.

In any case, this reminds me that actual design standards in reports and analysis are important – why do you think Jupiter Research and Forrester seem to have templated charts and tables (oh hey, aren’t they the same company now?) Despite the red, Jupiter’s report and infovis templates are highly readable – the same for Forrester’s green (will it all turn into christmas trees now that they are one?)

If you haven’t already you should sit down with your analytics team and hash out the following:

1. Standard Color Palette – be consistent in your application of color

2. Standard Elements for Charts

3. Standard Sized for Charts

4. Standard Application of Chart Types to Dimension Types

5. Standards for Fonts (type-face, size etc)

6. And yes, Standards for table design

By using the same conventions over and over, you not only save yourself a lot of busy work, but you encourage your audience by re-enforcing usage through design, it makes it easier for them to grok how to use something if they see it over and over again.

M.I.T.

A friend passed along this little M.I.T. project – mycrocosm. The site’s homepage says about itself:

a web service that allows you to share snippets of information from the minutiae of daily life in the form in[sic] simple statistical graphs.

I’ll interpret that as an InfoViz twitter-like service. Using a very simple (although the grammar does take some getting used to) interface where you essentially use normal language words and numerals to create simple charts.

I’ve only played with it a bit, but it is kind of fun. You can check out the test graphs that I made.

However, a couple of odd points:

1. Login/Registration is only through OpenId so this clearly isn’t for the mainstream yet.
2. There is no site search so the only way to find stuff is either by someone telling you wear to look or by browsing the pages tag cloud.
3. There doesn’t appear to be a way to share the graphs outside of mycrocosm

If this is supposed to be a social/sharing data visualization service, the folks at M.I.T. need to make it easier to discover your friends/colleagues/whoever that are also on mycrocosm.

The graphs need to be accessible outside of mycrocosm. It’s fairly easy to use the Google Chart API to get some simple visualizations into my blog but there isn’t any sort of method to take my mycrocosm visualizations macro ;~).

If my tongue-in-cheek description of this service as a twitter for InfoViz is correct, then it should be hooked up to twitpic or friendfeed or facebook, or etc. so that the folks in my social graph will be notified when I’ve done another minutiae-driven chart or whatever.

Ok, so what’s good about it?

• It’s kinda fun – for geeks like me
• The chart design is pretty solid – not a lot of chart junk, color schemes seem to be carefully chosen etc. (although why they decided that a pie chart should be the default chart is beyond me)
• Data entry is simple – keep in mind that this is clearly for small data sets, but still you don’t have to be an R developer or know xml and javascript to create a little graph – you don’t even have to know basic HTML

I’ll be keeping an eye on it to see where they go with it.

Powered by Twitter Tools.

It’s still not finished, there is definitely some weirdness but I wanted to get this redesign out so that I would have some added pressure to get it done.

What do you think so far?