Egads Google does everything

Well, in addition to providing:

• the best search algorithm on the Internet for content, hands down, in text, pictures and video
  
• free email
• context-driven advertising
• aggregated news from over a thousand news outlets
  
• interactive mapping technology
• word processing and number crunching
• cloud computing
• personal syndication of any content you want
• photo-sharing communities
• API's to let developers harness Google's technology for their own uses
  
• and most of the above offered on mobile platforms in addition to desktop platforms
• not to mention free hosting of this very blog and thousands of others;

Google is introducing yet another interesting and free product: visualization of public data, vis a vis interactive graphs of unemployment statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census. So Google's taking publicly available data and visualizing it using technology from Trendalyzer, a firm it acquired two years ago.

To see one of the new graphs, and there's one for each county and many cities in the nation I'm pretty sure, just type "unemployment rate" and a city or county and state into Google's search box. The graph appears at the top of the search results. Pretty cool.

In its blog entry announcing the new feature, Google says: "We also hope that this will pave the way for public data to take a more central role in informed public conversations."

Sounds like Google is taking a cue straight from the mission statements of newspapers. Of course, this is something newspapers and their Web sites don't readily do. So it's only fitting Google is going to eat our lunch.

Test database

Click here to load this Caspio Bridge DataPage.

Can you charge for content?

A trio of big-name media execs think you can. This NYTimes article is a little vague on the details but that makes sense.

Journalism Online L.L.C., their company, will have an automated system for news outlet to charge for content. After reading a certain amount of a story, a teaser, the user is prompted to pay for more.

The names, straight from the story, are:

Steven Brill, creator of Court TV and American Lawyer magazine, among other ventures; L. Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, one of the few newspapers to charge online; and Leo Hindery Jr., who has headed communications companies like Tele-Communications Inc., Global Crossing and the YES Network, and now runs InterMedia Partners, a private equity firm that specializes in media.

This would only work, I imagine, if every news outlet in a given market area or reader demographic group only distributed through this company. Obviously if you could get an AP feed from Google or somewhere with the same info, that would negate the need to pay for access. So would a country-wide media conglomerate be allowed to exist? Isn't there an anti-trust problem here?

Visualization test

This is a test graph using Many Eyes, a social visualization site. Many Eyes lets you upload data and play with different ways of showing it via graphs, charts, maps, and eye-popping crazy variants of these. You can share them and discuss others' work on the site. It's free. The researchers at IBM, who run this Web site, tell me they have no plans to add advertising to the site. They do, however, use the site for their own research.

Below is a bar graph of high school graduation and dropout rates for all Virginia school districts. This uses data from the Virginia Dept. of Education web site, which has all sorts of stuff on it, organized pretty cleanly. I just pulled out the graduation and dropout rates.



I may use this on timesdispatch.com if I can get the right results. As far as I can tell Many Eyes works best on data sets with only two columns. It doesn't work so great if you have multiple variables or (what would be on excel) a pivot table. By that I mean it doesn't let you drill down through multiple sets of linked data very easily. Still, there are tons of possibilities for this, and you can't beat free.

Video: rat basketball

Well yes this post is just self-promotion, but who can resist rats of the sewer variety jumping through hoops with a little ball?
A video I did at the Science Museum of Virginia, the week before the Final Four: