Data visualizations are a great way to make something complex more easily understood from any spreadsheet or table. Verifiable, a free visualization tool does just that, by quickly organizing uploaded data sets into charts that can be customized and manipulated using a drag and drop control scheme that feels a lot like making a playlist in iTunes.
What's interesting here is that the service is putting both the charts and the data in the same place, so you can go behind the curtain to double check to see the source numbers. The other day when we wrote a follow up on the TechCrunch50 and Demo conferences and showed what was live and what was dead, we included charts, but in order to back everything up we had to drop the source spreadsheet in there, too. With Verifiable, the source data would have been there, but only seen when users clicked on the charts.
There are number of ways to get your data onto the service. You can upload from your hard drive, or paste the data by pasting it into a text box. However my favorite is by linking it up to Google Docs and Spreadsheets which lets you suck in your data from the cloud. You can even narrow it down by what part of the spreadsheet you want to get the numbers from.
I'll be honest here, I don't have a whole lot of use for this in my daily routine, but compared to some other data comparison services like Tablefy, iCharts and Swivel, Verifiable's Web app feel seems more attuned to folks who need to remix and re-order data they already have.
Here's a sample chart. To see all the fun data behind it, you'll have to click on it.
The Webware 100 is going strong, and if you're still in the voting mood, Digg has unveiled their list of 10 finalists for their API visualization contest, which can be voted on by--you guessed it--digging. Like Digg Expose, which I wrote about earlier this week (and is coincidentally a nominee), each of the finalists has found some really neat ways to play with Digg user data.
One of the most interesting aspects of this contest is the use of Adobe Apollo. Four of the 10 finalists' offerings are served up as Apollo apps, which is fairly impressive considering how young the platform is. The only downer is having to download and install them as applications.
(Above) DiggCity is one of the new visualization nominees. It also looks vaguely similar to Ghostbusters for the Atari 2600 (below)
(Credit: CNET Networks)Currently, one of the most popular visualizations is DiggCity, which represents the 10 most recently popular stories as buildings in a small, virtual city. Users who Digg stories are displayed as stick figures, who go into each building and make it bigger. It immediately reminded me of Ghostbusters for the Atari 2600 with its simplistic graphics style, and meandering residents (see picture to the right), but succeeds in quickly showing you which stories are getting the most growth.
Another neat nominee is WordWeb, which joins together the most prevalent keywords used on the service to show relationships. Stories with similar keywords get grouped and linked up, and you can simply click on keywords to explore what other stories are connected. Exploring WordWeb feels a little bit like Quintura, the visual search engine, although the only results you're getting will be Digg stories.
My personal favorite of all of the entries is DiggCharts, which is a really simple tool to track popular stories, and when they got there. Typically this information is relegated to the content owners who have access to traffic stats; in this case, you're getting the data from when the story made its way onto Digg. Digg Charts breaks down the popularity of the 10 stories that most recently made their way onto the front page. You can then drill down through each story and view when the story began to pick up its Diggs, user comments, and popularity. In many cases, the curves all have a similar flow, although I came across one or two that had gone up and down a few times before beginning to peak.
All of the nominees can be found here. There's also a post about it on the official Digg blog.
I'm a sucker for data visualizations. I waxed poetic about Swivel, the site that's attempting to make data charts accessible and useful, and the things that are coming out of Digg's labs from Stamen Design continue to innovate and change the way users can interact with social sites.
This afternoon I've been glued to "Diggspose" , a mashup made in Adobe Flash that combines Snap.com's preview shots of Web pages with popular and upcoming stories on Digg.com. The result is a moving picture show of story thumbnails you can click on and manipulate. The moniker Diggspose is a nod to Mac OS X's Expose feature, which tiles thumbnails of active desktop windows--an effect that has been emulated in Diggspose with three quick cascading presets. Diggspose also pulls double duty as an extension of Diggspy, Digg's live feed of newly submitted stories. Using Diggspose, you can now watch this stream with thumbnails in real time, using a neat carousel effect.
The service is hosted by Yourminis, the single-page aggregation service. Expect several other neat and new visualizations for the popular user-generated site beginning on Thursday, when Digg unveils the top 10 finalists for its API visualization contest.
[via Digg]
Digg's stories show up as visual thumbnails. When you see one you're interested in, you can click it to go directly to the story, or hold control and click to go to its page on Digg.
(Credit: CNET Networks)- prev
- 1
- next
