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Again, US-centric, but this might generate some ideas of what could be accomplish in your city/nation. Late yesterday we announced a bunch of new features for Influence Explorer: http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2011/ie-corporate-accountability/ As the blog post explains, you can now find information about a corporation's EPA violations, federal advisory committee memberships, and participation in the rulemaking process -- all in one place. I wanted to highlight that last feature a bit more, though. To my knowledge, this is the first time that the full corpus of public comments submitted to regulations.gov has been available for bulk download and analysis. This isn't a coincidence: regulations.gov is built using technologies that make scraping it unusually difficult. This is unfortunate, since everyone seems to agree that federal rulemakings are gaining in importance -- both because of congressional gridlock that leaves the regulatory process as a second-best option, and because of calls to simplify the regulatory landscape as a pro-growth measure. It's an area where influence is certainly exerted -- rulemakers are obliged to review every comment -- but little attention is paid to who's flooding dockets with comments, and which directions rules are being pushed. It's taken us several months to develop a reliable solution and to obtain past rulemakings, but we now have the data in hand. We plan to do much more with this dataset, and we're hoping that others will want to dig in, too. You can find a link to the bulk download options in the post above -- the full compressed archive of extracted text and metadata is ~16GB, but we've provided options for grabbing individual agencies' or dockets' data. If anyone wants the original documents (PDFs, DOCs, etc) we can talk through how to make that happen, but as they clock in at 1.5TB we'll want to make sure folks know what they're getting into before we spend the time and bandwidth. Finally, note that we currently o

Who can use Twiangulate? Job Seekers Looking for an "in" at a company or trying to learn which tweeps might influence the hiring manager or boss? Or looking for tweeps at target companies or industries in a certain location? Twiangulate has you covered. Journalists Want to find hidden relationships or linchpin players in an industry? Maybe you're looking for sources in a microniche? Or who's most followed at a conference? Twiangulate does it all. Tech Junkies Want to know who your most influential Twitter followers are? Love social network mapping? Want to know when two tweeps start following the same person? Twiangulate!

Good piece on how to apply crowd-sourcing. March 22, 2012, 10:18 a.m. Television Broadcasters don't want to put campaign ad data online, so ProPublica pitches work-around With volunteers around the country, the news nonprofit is continuing its efforts to figure out what works and what doesn't when it comes to crowdsourced reporting.

"Want to help fact-check breaking news like the Malaysian airplane disaster? Here's how and where you can do it"

Hello, this is the Open Flash Chart project. Note: "Open Flash Chart 2" is LGPL. OK, Open Flash Chart 1.x was great and it works like a dream. But I made some little mistakes which over time grew and anyoyed me and made the source code weird. So I decided it was time to re-jigger the code and make it pretty again. The big change is moving the data format to JSON. This has made a big difference and has allowed some pretty cool new features. While I was hacking away at the source code I moved it all to Actionscript 3, and used Adobe Flex to compile it. This means everything is open source. If you want to make changes to the charts all you need is laid out in these instructions. Just because there is a new version doesn't make V 1.x obsolete. You can use both versions at the same time so leave your current working code in V 1.x and make all the new charts using which ever version you find easier to use. Why is V2 better? Well it uses JSON as the file format and this means you can do cool stuff like Grant Slender has: http://code.google.com/p/ofcgwt/ If you like Open Flash Chart and want to see it continue, please help Donate some money :-) Blog about it (promotion takes up about a third of my time) Write a cool library Really. You can make a massive difference to the project! Need help choosing reseller hosting for your charts? Make sure you read reliable web hosting reviews. Why choose Open Flash Chart? This is a little gentle propaganda for the project. Like all opinions, disregard it and make up your own mind. Edge cases such as tooltips encourage user interactivity and data exploration what happens to the tooltip when two points are in the same position? you can re-size the charts missing data save the chart as an image You can highlight or emphasize one (or many) points PC Pro loves open flash chart. Server Side Helper Libraries PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, .NET, Google Web Toolkit and JAVA. Libraries. Next: Che

Daniel Lathrop Wanted to share with all of you my latest installment in my ongoing love affair with Google Fusion Tables, the Dallas publicly-traded companies list. http://newsapps.dallasnews.com/media/dfw-public-companies.html I got the data from the biz desk on Thursday and wrote this little thing using JQuery, JQueryUI and FusionTables pretty quickly. And before everyone gets all "but you could have used [Caspio, TableSetter, Rails, PHP, Ilene, etc.]" on me, I know I could have. But doing this with Fusion Tables let me do all my work on the client side and let me create the user-experience I wanted. Plus, I now have a starting place to do this for any similar Fusion Tables project. For the curious, the Javascript can be found here: http://newsapps.dallasnews.com/media/fusiondmn.pubcompanies.js It's fewer than 150 lines, and more than a quarter of that is my Javascript for for rendering integer/floating point #s in newsroom style (e.g. $4.2 billion). I'm hoping to turn it into a robust tool for deploying searchable data with Fusion Tables and am going to ask my corporate overlords to let me open source it once I've done some refactoring to make it generally applicable. Critiques welcome. -Daniel --------------------------- Daniel Lathrop 206.718.0349 (cell)

Solving the Pie Chris Gemignani December 14, 2006 By: Chris Gemignani Last week I challenged you to reproduce this alternative to pie charts in Excel. I promised a screencast to show how it's done. http://juiceanalytics.com/writing/2006/12/square-pie-screencast/ Square Pie Eighteen people answered the call with nearly three dozen different solutions. Click here to watch the screencast showing how to accomplish the two most popular solutions; filling cells with conditional formatting and pushing the column chart to extremes. If you want to look at the source,Clint Ivy produced an excellent version of the cell filling approach.

Data journalism at the Guardian: what is it and how do we do it? Simon Rogers: Our 10 point guide to data journalism and how it's changing Share reddit this Comments (2) Data abstract Data journalism. What is it and how is it changing? Photograph: Alamy Here's an interesting thing: data journalism is becoming part of the establishment. Not in an Oxbridge elite kind of way (although here's some data on that) but in the way it is becoming the industry standard. Two years ago, when we launched the Datablog, all this was new. People still asked if getting stories from data was really journalism and not everyone had seen Adrian Holovaty's riposte. But once you've had MPs expenses and Wikileaks, the startling thing is that no-one asks those questions anymore. Instead, they want to know, "how do we do it?"

Charts and graphs are the best ways to represent information and relationship between two interlinked entities. Not only do charts and graphs inform visitors about the trend or relationship you want to show them but also add a visual connection with the visitors. Several online tools are available that help you create comprehensively designed flowcharts and graphs that worth a thousands words. Check them out and let us know what you feel about these tools. http://www.smashingapps.com/2011/08/26/45-free-online-tools-to-create-charts-diagrams-and-flowcharts.html

How It Works SpeakerText combines artificial and human intelligence to offer low-cost, high-quality video transcription. Sign up for an account Import your video library (we currently support Ooyala, Brightcove, YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud, Wistia and Blip.tv), or add your videos one-by-one. Choose which videos you want to transcribe. Check out and pay. SpeakerText sends you an email when your transcripts are finished. Download your transcripts as text or XML files from SpeakerText OR install CaptionBox and download your transcripts as HTML code to place on your website. Guarantee We guarantee that your transcripts will get back to you in less than 72 hours and be of the highest quality. Give it a try now! http://speakertext.com

This is the first I've heard of a tool like this doing a creditable job. I suspect there is some machine transcription going on, but then the first pass is sent to India or Jamaica to be polished. Here's an example of how the NYTimes used this tool: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/01/20/us/politics/20090120_INAUGURAL_ANALYSIS.html

Part 2 of the Open Data, Open Society report is now available online Posted on September 1, 2011 by marco Open Data, Open Society is a research project about openness of public data in EU local administrations by for the Laboratory of Economics and Management of Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa. The first report of the project, released in October 2010 under a Creative Commons cc-by license, can be downloaded from the website of the DIME project (PDF) or read online as one HTML file on the Sant'Anna School website (*). The conclusions of the project, a shorter report titled "Open Data: Emerging trends, issues and best practices" and finished in June 2011, are now available online under the same license at the following locations: single HTML file PDF format, Sant'Anna school PDF format, DIME website Another part of the project, the Open Data, Open Society survey has been extended until the end of 2011. Thank you in advance for announcing the survey to all the city and regional administrations of EU-15 and, if you want, to add further translations of its introduction!

Mapping Sheets Another favorite Google Drive add-on of mine is definitely Mapping Sheets. With this add-on, you can make better use of any geographical data you may have in your spreadsheet. If you've ever wanted an easy way to quickly plot locations from your data onto a Google Map, this is it. drive addons8   5 Google Drive Add ons You Need To Use Using it is ridiculously easy. Just make sure you've got a list of addresses and other related data in your sheet, and then trigger this add-on. You'll see a form where you tell it what columns in your sheet to use for creating the map. drive addons9   5 Google Drive Add ons You Need To Use Once you submit it, the add-on creates the map right in the sheet for you so that you have a useful visualization of all of that data.

I came back from last year's National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (NICAR) conference with 22 free tools for data visualization and analysis -- most of which are still popular and worth a look. At this year's conference, I learned about other free (or at least inexpensive) tools for data analysis and presentation. Want to see all the tools from last year and 2012? For quick reference, check out our chart listing all 30 free data visualization and analysis tools. Like that previous group of 22 tools, these range from easy enough for a beginner (i.e., anyone who can do rudimentary spreadsheet data entry) to expert (requiring hands-on coding). Here are eight of the best:

Searchable Map Template with Google Fusion Tables Turn a spreadsheet in to a searchable map You want to put your data on a searchable, filterable map. This is a free, open source tool to help you do it. Features clean, full screen layout new mobile and tablet friendly using responsive design address search (with variable radius) geolocation (find me!) new RESTful URLs for sharing searches results count (using Google's Fusion Tables API) ability to easily add additional search filters (checkboxes, sliders, etc) all done with HTML, CSS and Javascript - no server side code required Technologies used Google Fusion Tables (useful resources) Google Maps API V3 jQuery jQuery Address Twitter Bootstrap Note: This template is now supports the Fusion Tables v1 API. For more info on this, see their migration guide

What is it? A social analytics platform which contains over 1,000 days of tweets (all 70 billion of them), Facebook activity and blog posts. How is it of use to journalists? "Journalists can easily develop real-time insights into any story from Playground," PeopleBrowsr UK CEO Andrew Grill explains. Complex keyword searches can be divided by user influence, geolocation, sentiment, and virtual communities of people with shared interests and affinities. These features - and many more - let reporters and researchers easily drill down to find the people and content driving the conversation on social networks on any subject. Playground lets you use the data the way you want to use it. You can either export the graphs and tables that the site produces automatically or export the results in a CSV file to create your own visualisations, which could potentially make it the next favourite tool of data journalists. Grill added: The recent launch of our fully transparent Kred influencer platform will make it faster and easier for journalists to find key influencers in a particular community. You can give Playground a try for the first 14 days before signing up for one of their subscriptions ($19 a month for students and journalists, $149 for organisations and companies).

Express Planner http://www.planningforce-express.com/ Those persons with a yen for project management will want to take a look at Planning Force's Express Planner. The program is designed for those doing work in project management and business, and it gives users the ability to apply calendars to projects and tasks, prioritize items, and create reports. The site includes several tutorials, and it is compatible with computers running Linux and Windows 2000 and newer. [KMG]

Visualization contests around the corner May 25, 2011 to Contests | Comments (3) The best way to learn how to visualize data is to grab a dataset and see what you can do with it. You can read as many tips and tricks as you want, but you're not going to get any better until you actually try. Contests are a fun way to do this. Participate So here are a handful of visualization contests to get your hands dirty. Hey you might even win a couple of thousand dollars. Not that money matters to you, because as well all know, learning is your reward. Hacking Education - A contest for developers and data crunchers. DonorsChoose.org has inspired $80 million in giving from 400,000 donors, helping 165,000 teachers at 43,000 schools, and the donation site has opened up this data. Can do you do something with it? Deadline: June 30, 2011. Data In Sight - A hands-on competition in San Francisco's SoMa district with surprise data sources. Some talks, lunch, dinner, and a 24-hour hackathon. Event date: June 24, 2011 (better to register your team early). Tableau Interactive Viz Contest - This one is coming up the quickest, but is the most straightforward. Plus, you get a t-shirt just for entering. Grab some business, finance, or real estate data and go to town with Tableau Public. Deadline: June 3, 2011.

By Dan Nguyen Reactions to Osama bin Laden's death: Female and non-U.S. residents more ambivalent. Via the NYT Reactions Matrix By Dan Nguyen | Published: May 9, 2011 This (totally not-double-checked) analysis is a riff off of the excellent New York Times visualization (The Death of a Terrorist: A Turning Point?) of how people reacted to Osama bin Laden's death. In the days following the news, the Times asked online readers to not only write their thoughts on bin Laden's killing, but put a mark on a scatterplot graph that best described their reaction. The Times used the data to show the continuum of reactions from everyone who participated. I wanted to see how reactions differed across geographical location and gender. Includes details of his methodology (and a bit on that of the original NYT graphic)

Suggestions (but not standards) for live tweeting September 6, 2011 by Steve Buttry "Do you know of any standards for content of live tweets?" a commenter asked on my blog recently. "I have students live tweet meetings and speeches. Would love some specific guidelines for what makes a good tweet," asked Michele Day, who teaches journalism at Northern Kentucky University. I know of no such standards. And if I did, I'd probably react that "standards" for a developing pursuit such as live-tweeting might be a bit rigid. This is a new technique and we are learning about it as we do it. I don't want standards to inhibit our development and experimentation with the technique. My standards would be the standards of good reporting: Be accurate, fair, interesting and engaging. https://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/suggestions-but-not-standards-for-live-tweeting

Get TargetMap Premium for 7 days! Happy Mapping! We have reached 10 Million visitors... and we keep evolving! Targetmap has released a new Territory Manager and we're giving you 7 days Premium use in Targetmap for FREE to celebrate it. Territory Manager will let you: - See on the Map how your clients and Sales Reps are distributed - Aling and optimize your sales force potentials by Postal Codes (improving the customer service and saving expenses) - See and assign your Franchise's coverage area and evaluate their potential. - Export the Map to your presentations and the final Data to your CRM or Call Center. Maybe you want to give us a bit of your time and watch this video (it lasts 15 minutes... But there are so many features!) http://targetmap.blogspot.com/2011/09/get-targetmap-premium-for-7-days.html