Battery life is one of the most crucial specs when it comes to any electronic device, and iOS devices tout some of the best claims in the business. But what do you do when you’re not getting anywhere close to the advertised claims? Obviously usage patterns vary, but a growing number of people are noticing drastically reduced battery life when a device is in standby most of the day.

A large part of the infographic’s intrinsic appeal seems to lie in its visual reductionism of complex information. Reductionism itself is not inherently bad—in fact, it’s an essential part of any kind of synthesis, be it mapmaking, journalism, particle physics, or statistical analysis. The problem arises when the act of reduction—in this case rendering data into an aesthetically elegant graphic—actually begins to unintentionally oversimplify, obscure, or warp the author’s intended narrative, instead of bringing it into focus.

Every time I see a word cloud presented as insight, I die a little inside.

Just choose a country and a way to create your map by color, type values or by uploading your excel files (you can even use your zip / postal code column to get the best and most accurate maps!)

Timeplot is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for plotting time series and overlay time-based events over them (with the same data formats that Timeline supports).

With this widget, you can make beautiful interactive timelines like the one below. Try dragging it horizontally or using your mouse-wheel. Click on each event for more details.

Here's something we came up with to help you consider which chart to use. It was inspired by the table in Gene Zelazny's classic work Saying It With Charts (p. 27 in the 4th. ed)

Tableau Public is a free service that lets you create and share data visualizations on the web. Thousands use it to share data on websites and blogs and through social media like Facebook and Twitter. Tableau Public allows you to see data efficiently and powerfully without any programming.

OutWit Hub explores the depths of the Web for you, automatically collecting and organizing data and media from online sources.

OutWit Hub breaks down Web pages into their different constituents. Navigating from page to page automatically, it extracts information elements and organizes them into usable collections.

The World Cup 2010 website is a significant step change in the way that content is published. From first using the site, the most striking changes are the horizontal navigation and the larger, format high-quality video. As you navigate through the site it becomes apparent that this is a far deeper and richer use of content than can be achieved through traditional CMS-driven publishing solutions.

I will convert your Excel data into one of several web-friendly formats, including HTML, JSON and XML.

I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think." The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous, If the meaning of the words "machine" and "think" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, "Can machines think?" is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words.

Infographics and data visualizations are shifting the way people find and experience stories, creating a new way of seeing the world of data. They help communicate complex ideas in a clear, compact and beautiful way, taking deep data and presenting it in visual shorthand. We’ve collected the best examples on the web and gathered them for you to reference, share, and enjoy.

What’s interesting is that over 20 years before sparklines came on the scene, Tufte developed a different type of data visualization that didn’t fare nearly as well. To date, in fact, I’ve only been able to find three examples of it, and even they aren’t completely in line with his vision.

Any time you’d use a line chart to show a progression of univariate data among multiple actors over time, you might have a good candidate for a slopegraph.

We’re quickly figuring out how to navigate our trail of data — don’t say anything private on a Facebook wall, keep your secrets out of e-mail, use cash for illicit purchases. The vast majority of it, though, is worthless to us and a pretty good exchange for frequent-flier miles, better search results, a fast system to qualify for credit, finding out if our babysitter has a criminal record and ads we find more useful than annoying. Especially because no human being ever reads your files. As I learned by trying to find out all my data, we’re not all that interesting.

Give Me My Data is a Facebook application that helps users export their data out of Facebook. Reasons could include making artwork, archiving and deleting your account, or circumventing the interface Facebook provides. Data can be exported in CSV, XML, and other common formats. Give Me My Data is currently in public-beta.

Chartwell is a family that explores the use of OpenType to interpret and visualize data. The font format is highly portable and can be used in any application that supports standard ligatures. The data also remains editable allowing for easy updates.

A short story about recession, attraction and data visualisation.

Most journalists are just like Gilbert, with daily computer skills that include Internet searches, word processing, and maybe some basic calculations in Excel, none of which enables journalists to truly mine large collections of data. Meanwhile, the amount of raw data available to journalists has mushroomed. At the federal level, the Obama administration’s “open government” initiative has given rise to new sources like Data.gov, a website devoted to the aggregation and easy dissemination of national data sets. State and local governments have followed suit, making much of the data they collect available online. More elusive tranches of data have been pried loose by nonprofit organizations courtesy of the Freedom of Information Act; an inquisitive journalist can download them in minutes. “I’m constantly amazed and surprised about what’s out there,” said Thomas Hargrove, who often leads data-based research projects for the chain’s fourteen newspapers and nine television stations.

“What am I passionate about?” This is the essential starting point for any discussion of what the Web is, what it is becoming, and how it should be presented. The individual, with their needs, their passions, their opinions, their desires and their goals is always paramount. We tend to forget this, or overlook it, or just plain ignore it. We design from a point of view which is about what we have to say, what we want to present, what we expect to communicate. It’s not that that we should ignore these considerations, but they are always secondary. The Web is a ground for being. Individuals do not present themselves as receptacles to be filled. They are souls looking to be fulfilled. This is as true for children as for adults – perhaps more so – and for this reason the educational Web has to be about space and place for being, not merely the presentation of a good-looking set of data.

RT @abesh: Trying to export contacts from Google to Facebook yields this warning : http://www.google.com/mail/help/contacts_export_confi ...

Cluetrain Manifesto coauthor David Weinberger has just released a new book and it's a good one. Titled Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, Weinberger looks closely at how computers and the internet have have fundamentally altered how we organize and use information. Traditionally, because information was bound by atoms (usually paper), everything must go someplace but it can only go one place. But now through things such as tagging, contextual search, and social networks, we can, as he says, hang leaves on more that one branch (eg. Amazon's listing of books in multiple categories) and thus miscellany becomes an asset, not an incomprehensible mess.

Twitter can guess the topics a user is interested in by looking at the users he follows that don't follow him back: http://bit.ly/d1liBT

"Firstly, and most importantly, the site that you’ve decided to “regularly monitor” is no longer being updated. Had you taken the trouble to look further than the one page that seems to have attracted your attention, you would have noticed that there have been no updates to the site since as long ago as 2006; the address that you cite quite clearly lists the Watford FC fixtures for the 2005/06 season rather than anything more recent. As far as we are aware, neither NetResult nor Football DataCo Limited make any claim to copyright over past events, nor have any legal basis for preventing absolutely anyone from displaying such information; we eagerly look forward to any attempt to claim ownership of universally-available historical facts with great amusement."

Some elegant writing on Giz. Our death isn't the death of our data. All the photos, videos, stories and music we've stored in the cloud will mean we are the first generation(s) to long outlive our physical bodies.