Infographics that People Understand – Book Review

Stephen Few in his Blog ‘Visual Business Intelligence’ is enthusiastic about a new book dealing with information visualisation: ‘At Last, a Scientific Approach to Infographics‘.
The book written by Connie Malamed: Visual Language for Designers: Principles for Creating Graphics that People Understand,
Rockport Publishers, Inc., 2009.

What’s New@OECD July 2009, revised (some extracts)

Follow OECD on Twitter! OECDtweet and on Facebook! OECD on Facebook and on Youtube! OECD on Youtube
Bookmark  the OECD Factbook 2009 – Mobile Edition on your iPhone, Blackberry or any phone, and access the 100 top OECD indicators from anywhere: Factbook 2009 – Mobile Edition
OECD Statistics Newsletter features articles migration statistics, synergies between official and [...]

To build an ecosystem of data on the Web

Using statistical data to explain the world, telling stories with statistical data, visualizing statistical data to make these data accessible in a quick and instructive manner – all these topics are well known and belong to  long and intensive discussions and activities in many institutions of official statistics. Results can be seen on the websites [...]

Yahoo Pipes – still going strong

Mixing up several web services into a new web service – a mashup -  is made easy with Yahoo Pipes (see earlier post).
Yahoo Pipes is also capable of integrating csv-files and with this becomes interesting for statistics (globalizes official statistics).
An example with data from the US census Bureau:

Another one for UK Cities

This example used an [...]

A New View of Data.Gov

A New View of Data.Gov (from Google Public Policy Blog)
Friday, July 10, 2009 | 3:09 PM
On May 21, the Obama administration launched Data.gov, a web site that provides access to raw data from federal government agencies. Access to this raw data is useful, but to unleash the power of the data, you need tools for [...]

Webinar 15-16 July: Seminar on Innovative Approaches to Turn Statistics into Knowledge, Washington D.C.

Instructions for joining the webinar. (See also Wikpedia.)
Program and presentations.
Invitation to the seminar.

Real-time Search

In the age of microblogging search engines have to be very, very quick in indexing the continuous stream of information. The search engine Collecta indexes blogs, blog comments, microblogs like Twitter, Jaiku and also fotos in Flickr.

In order to find out more about search engines beyond Google see the article of  Ryan Singel in WIRED [...]

ReadWriteWeb Interview With Tim Berners-Lee, Part 1: Linked Data

Written by Richard MacManus / July 8, 2009 6:00 AM / 8 Comments
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How Linked Data Relates to The Semantic Web
RWW: Earlier this year you gave an inspiring talk at TED about Linked Data. You described Linked Data as a sea change akin to the [...]

Though Obama Viewed Positively, Still Much Criticism of US Foreign Policy: Global Poll

Though Obama Viewed Positively, Still Much Criticism of US Foreign Policy: Global Poll
July 7, 2009
Country-by-Country Summaries (PDF)
Questionnaire/Methodology (PDF)
Full PDF Version
A new WorldPublicOpinion.org poll finds that around the world US foreign policy continues to receive heavy criticism on a variety of fronts, even though in 13 of 19 nations most people say they have confidence in [...]

Is the Economy Getting Ready to Turn Around? (from Flowing Data)

Is the Economy Getting Ready to Turn Around?
Posted by Nathan / Jul 6, 2009 to Economics, Infographics / 2 comments

Is the economy going to turn around any time soon? How does this economic swing compare to previous cycles? Amanda Cox et al of the New York Times explores these ever so important questions in [...]

OECD eXplorer on the BBC News

NCVA’s OECD eXplorer on the BBC News (direct link to NEWS SITE for National Center for Visual Analytics, NCVA, at the University of Linköping, Sweden)

On July 2nd BBC News showed a 3 minutes long program demonstrating OECD eXplorer in live action to explore and visualize complex regional statistical world data – a geovisual analytics technique [...]

The Semantic Web Gang

The Semantic Web Gang is a monthly round-table podcast bringing together a regular panel of commentators on the Semantic Web.
Some examples:
May 2009: The Semantic Web Gang discuss Wolfram Alpha and Google’s RDFa
April 2009: The Semantic Web Gang discuss vocabularies and ontologies
July 2008: The Semantic Web Gang discusses interfaces to the Semantic Web

Blog about Stats on twitter

Microblogging (like twitter) provides short messages of a person or institution.
Blog about Stats uses twitter as complementary tool, providing hints and links on what’s new, interesting, strange in the field of  disseminating statistics: This is ‘Blog Stats’ Hints‘. It’s also possible to follow the microblogs of other people and institutions.
The newest short messages are shown [...]