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Meta
Tag Archives: Data sets
Tech Sharecase, 4 June 2010
Attendees
Arthur Downing, Ellen Kaufman, Robert Drzewicki, Stephen Francoeur, Ryan Phillips
Kobo
We briefly discussed Kobo, a competitor to the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook. A comparison chart provided at the Kobo web site charts Kobo’s features amongst its competitors.
Information Aesthetics
We then discussed the blog Information Aesthetics. This blog seeks out and presents projects that display information and data in creative ways. Some examples discussed were information arcs, the bible cross reference visualization project and a wheel of nutrition that displays portion sizes on dinner plates.
The conversation moved towards other ways of displaying information and the tools used to do so. Microsoft was mentioned given the fact that Excel 2010 is going to incorporate Spark Lines. We then took at look at Google Motion Charts that can be used in iGoogle and Google Docs. A few of us were introduced to motion charts through Hans Rosling’s Wealth & Health of Nations Motion Chart and his TED Talk . Also shown was the Wall Street Journal’s market sector maps for stock performance.
A couple of other web sites were mentioned: 1) Many Eyes a site for sharing data visualization and 2) InfoChimps for downloading all sorts of data sets.
Also touched upon was the Netflix prize. This was a $1 million contest for accurate predictions of movie ratings based on Netflix user movie preferences. The prize was awarded last September and a new contest was announced.
Miscellaneous
The conversation then moved to the current and future state of student printing, some of the issues and possible solutions. We also discussed the use of GoogleDocs on campus.
Lastly, we talked about the Boston, MA, public media outlet WGBH’s Open Vault–their online media archive and library. Roy Tennant’s covered Open Vault in a recent Library Journal blog entry.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Amazon Kindle, Data sets, Data visualization, Digital Media Library, E-book readers, E-books, Google, Google Docs, Tech Sharecase, Videos
1 Comment
What Data Do New Yorkers Want?
The City of New York is ramping up its efforts to make some of the vast amounts data it gathers and stores more easily accessible. A recent post on the New York Times blog, City Room, detailed major web initiatives that the city just announced it is working on:
- Launch NYC Big Apps, an annual competition for technology companies to develop proposals for new applications to make data sets more usable (the city has selected eighty data sets from thirty-two different agencies for entrants to work with).
- Create a 311 portal site that pulls together all the data on complaints that New Yorkers have left on the city’s 311 phone number.
- Use Skype and Twitter as additional ways to communicate with the city (you’ll be able to call 311 via Skype and receive alerts from the city via Twitter)
- Work with Google to get a better handle on how users are searching for information on NYC.gov and for city information generally in Google searches
You can read more about these initiatives on this press release from the city.
A number of outside companies are already scraping data from various city data sets and offering a friendly interface to that data. A great example of such an enterprise can be found in the EveryBlock service, which offers data harvested from municipal sources in fifteen cities, such as:
Chan, Sewell and Patrick McGeehan. “City Invites Software Developers to Crunch Big Data Sets.” City Room. The New York Times. 29 June 2009. Web. 8 July 2009.
City of New York. Mayor Bloomberg Announces Five Technology Initiatives to Improve Accessibility, Transparency and Accountability Across City Government. 29 June 2009. Web. 8 July 2009.
EveryBlock. Web. 8 July 2009.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Competitions, Data sets, EveryBlock, Google, Michael Bloomberg, New York, Patrick McGeehan, Portals, Search, Sewell Chan, Skype, The New York Times, Twitter, Web services
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