"Dataset is a JavaScript client-side data transformation and management library. Dataset makes managing client-side data easy by handling loading, parsing, sorting, querying & manipulating data from all sorts of sources."

"This handbook discusses the legal, social and technical aspects of open data. It can be used by anyone but is especially designed for those seeking to open up data. It discusses the why, what and how of open data – why to go open, what open is, and the how to ‘open’ data."

"With digitalised data and processes making transmission of knowledge increasingly abstract and intangible, information design has become crucially urgent — Michael Stoll, a university teacher and collector, explains the principles and scale of this discipline."

"As information design doesn't have a structured theoretical background, how do you organise your material? Have you created your own personal taxonomy?
I tried to face this problem—the fact that information design doesn't have a valid taxonomy—with my diploma back in 1991. My idea was to invent a taxonomy that helped journalists and information graphic artists to communicate on the same level. A taxonomy cannot relate to the aspect of visualisation—pie charts, bar charts, explosion drawings—which could disappear from time to time, but rather to the information behind the visualisation. All visual means that try to explain something to you can be placed into one of three groups. The first group is based on numbers, statistics and relations between sizes (data graphics); the second group is made up of objects (group system graphics); and the third one consists of spatial data like maps (spatial graphics). As these fields often overlap, it's also important to consider the borders between information design and, for example, illustration. I always say that information graphics has a strong appeal in the way it can clear up stuff and convey knowledge. Compared to examples such as illustration, information graphics always seeks to increase the knowledge of the reader, like every design process."

"Yasiv is a visual recommendation service that helps people to find the right product from Amazon's catalog. Being it a book, a movie or a video game - Yasiv finds anything what is sold on Amazon.com.

We often decide what to buy based on what others are buying. And it's not a bad thing after all. If something is bought by many of our friends there has to be a reason for that. Maybe it's good and worth its money? This is where Yasiv steps in: it shows what people are buying with other products. A link between two products means that they are often bought together. By simply observing the network of products one may guess what has more popularity and what has less.

The site is really in it's early stages and there are many things that we want to fix. But to know what's important and what's not we need your help. Please tell us what do you like and what you don't? We would really love to hear from you.

Yasiv is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com with no additional cost to customers."

"There’s lots of useful data on the internet – crime statistics, government spending, missing kittens…

But getting at it isn’t always easy. There's a table here, a report there, a few web pages, PDFs, spreadsheets… And it can be scattered over thousands of different places on the web, making it hard to see the whole picture and the story behind it. It’s like trying to build something from Lego when someone has hidden the bricks all over town and you have to find them before you can start building!

To get at data, programmers write bits of code called ‘screen scrapers’, which extract the useful bits so they can be reused in other apps, or rummaged through by journalists and researchers. But these bits of code tend to break, get thrown away or forgotten once they have been used, and so the data is lost again. Which is bad.

ScraperWiki is an online tool to make that process simpler and more collaborative. Anyone can write a screen scraper using the online editor. In the free version, the code and data are shared with the world. Because it's a wiki, other programmers can contribute to and improve the code."

"So, to frame the rest of this series, I'd like to share with you the Two Things about web measurement. Since first thinking about this, I've revised them a few times, but I think I've settled here:

Thing #1: There are no independently meaningful metrics. It's about combining them to answer questions.
Thing #2: Anything can be a source of data.

I believe that if you stick to these two things as non-negotiable truths, you'll get the most out of the measurement you do."

"OpenPaths is a secure data locker for personal location information.

Using our mobile apps you can track your location, visualize where you've been, and upload your data to the OpenPaths website. You can then download your data from the website in a variety of friendly formats, including KML, JSON, and CSV. The OpenPaths API enables you to integrate your own software with the platform, and you can import data from location-based services like Foursquare.

You can keep your location history to yourself, or you can share it with specific research initiatives, art projects, or educational programs as you so choose. The OpenPaths online interface allows you to manage who has access to your data. Regardless, your data is always encrypted on the OpenPaths servers, and cannot be accessed by anyone without your express consent."

Depressing (I think).

"In this post, we’re going to look at slopegraphs — what they are, how they’re made, why they haven’t seen a massive uptake so far, and why I think they’re about to become much more popular in the near future."

"Where people post geotagged photos to Flickr from and geotagged tweets to Twitter from."

"All Streets consists of 240 million individual road segments. No other features — no outlines, cities, or types of terrain — are marked, yet canyons and mountains emerge as the roads course around them, and sparser webs of road mark less populated areas."

Fathom is the information design studio of Ben Fry. Some cool projects for GE: visualizing health care in the U.S., tracking energy consumption of appliances over a month and more.

Breathtaking, insane work by Tatiana Plakhova.

"Graduated from Moscow State University with a Master in Social Psychology, and then studied in High Academic School of Graphic Design. Working as an art director, graphic designer and illustrator."

Not sure what tools she uses to create the art (probably Processing)

Noticed this in one of @WSJ's tweets: using Unicode characters to display an infographic akin to Edward Tufte's 'sparklines'. Kottke's post captures the relevant discussion around this subject.
Should think about twitter data visualization in general: movie ratings using full/half-full/empty star characters, etc.
Related idea: tweet taxonomy metadata -- icon at beginning of tweet? (star = interesting etc.)

"Cascade allows for precise analysis of the structures which underlie sharing activity on the web.

This first-of-its-kind tool links browsing behavior on a site to sharing activity to construct a detailed picture of how information propagates through the social media space. While initially applied to New York Times stories and information, the tool and its underlying logic may be applied to any publisher or brand interested in understanding how its messages are shared."

Kraftwerk release Kling Klang Machine No. 1 for iPhone & iPad. It uses real-time data based on geographical location to generate music.

"D3 allows you to bind arbitrary data to a Document Object Model (DOM), and then apply data-driven transformations to the document. As a trivial example, you can use D3 to generate a basic HTML table from an array of numbers. Or, use the same data to create an interactive SVG bar chart with smooth transitions and interaction."

"Our ability to generate information now far exceeds our capacity to understand it. Finding patterns and making meaningful connections inside complex data networks has emerged as one of the biggest challenges of the twenty-first century. In recent years, designers, researchers, and scientists have begun employing an innovative mix of colors, symbols, graphics, algorithms, and interactivity to clarify, and often beautify, the clutter. From representing networks of friends on Facebook to depicting interactions among proteins in a human cell, Visual Complexity presents one hundred of the most interesting examples of information-visualization by the field's leading practitioners."

Stamen's Mike Migurski on not testing, organic growth & getting the users' permission/trust (twitter, flickr) vs. pushing things down peoples' throat (epitomized by google buzz).