Weave (BETA 1.0) is a new web-based visualization platform designed to enable visualization of any available data by anyone for any purpose. Weave is an application development platform supporting multiple levels of user proficiency – novice to advanced – as well as the ability to integrate, disseminate and visualize data at “nested” levels of geography.

freeDive transforms Google Spreadsheets into searchable databases that can be embedded in web sites.

Actually, yes! If you want cheap hard drives you're going to have to make some sort of sacrifice, but you can definitely still find them at a reasonable price. Additionally, cloud storage is remarkably cheap at the moment and you can get a ton of it without paying anything at all. First let's tackle hard drives and then we'll look at how you can supplement your current situation with a bunch of free space in the cloud.

A pivot table report is a dynamic table that lets you interpret data in different ways without ever having to enter a formula. Pivot table reports are particularly useful when you want to narrow down a large data set or analyze relationships between data points.

In just a few clicks, you can summarize and analyze a large set of data through different categorizations and calculations. For example, from a list of students in a college class, you can get a quick understanding of the the age distribution of and number of science majors in the class.

ThinkUp is a free, open source web application that captures your posts, tweets, replies, retweets, friends, followers and links on social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

With ThinkUp, you can store your social activity in a database that you control, making it easy to search, sort, analyze, publish and display activity from your network. All you need is a web server that can run a PHP application.

The easiest way to migrate your Facebook friends is to import them through a Yahoo email address. I know that sounds awful, but hear me out: While a few people have created browser extensions and other migration methods, Facebook shuts them down pretty quickly, since they don't like non-partners pulling friend data. In addition, the non-Yahoo methods usually add your Facebook friends to Google Contacts, which you probably don't want. You may not have a Yahoo account, but that's what makes this method great—no need to fill up your main address book with Facebook junk. Plus, it really does only take a few minutes.

Get *your* data contact out of Facebook, whether they want you to or not. You gave them your friends and allowed them to store that data, and you have right to take it back out! Facebook doesn't own my friends.

Upload a text file or spreadsheet of your customers' emails and instantly get age, gender, and location data.

@juliannehing right? pretty wild. and that LAT series just won the Phillip Meyer Journalism Award.


Three major investigative reports that used social science research methods as key parts of their probes were named today as winners of the 2010 Philip Meyer Journalism Award.


The Los Angeles Times took first place for its project “Grading the Teachers.” Using gain-score analysis, the staff at the Times analyzed the test scores of individual students and their teachers to identify the most and least effective teachers based on the how much their students’ test scores improved.

In second place is “Sexual Assault on Campus,” a project spearheaded by the Center for Public Integrity. The series utilized survey methods to outline the impact of unreported sexual assaults on campuses across the country.

Third place goes to the The Orange County Register for “Immigrants and the California Economy.” Through census and immigration data, the series revealed that the state of California relies on immigrant labor more than any other state. Analysis of these two data sets showed immigration enforcement policies have been ignored for decades in the state.

The Meyer Award recognizes the best uses of social science methods in journalism. The awards will be presented on February 25 in Raleigh, N.C. at the 2011 CAR Conference. The first-place winner will receive $500; second and third will receive $300 and $200 respectively.

The award is administered by the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (a joint program of Investigative Reporters and Editors and the Missouri School of Journalism) and the Knight Chair in Journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

SBook®5 is an extremely fast, AI-based personal information manager. Information is organized in free-format entries --- one for each person or company. Each entry can have any number of postal addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, photographs, URLs, and other information.

SBook5 automatically tells the difference between an entry that represents a person and one that represents a corporation, and sorts accordingly. The database then sorts entries as you would, if you only had the time.

SBook uses an artificial intelligence engine to recognize information in each free-form entry. SBook provides for transparent multi-user access to files shared over AppleShare, two-way synchronizing with Apple AddressBook, and automatic export of vCards to the Apple iPod.

Google Refine is a power tool for working with messy data, cleaning it up, transforming it from one format into another, extending it with web services, and linking it to databases like Freebase.

Cha called her paper, "The Million Follower Fallacy," a term that comes from work by Adi Avnit. Avnit posited that the number of followers of a Tweeter is largely meaningless, and Cha, after looking at data from all 52 million Twitter accounts (and, more closely, at the 6 million "active users") seems to have proven Avnit right. "Popular users who have a high indegree [number of followers] are not necessarily influential in terms of spawning retweets or mentions," she writes.

Small List, Big Results:  We’ve historically found a relationship between email list performance and list size.  In this year’s study, we grouped participants into three tiers for email list size (Small, under 100,000; Medium, 100,000-500,000, and Large, 500,000+ deliverable email addresses), and found significant differences in benchmarks based on this analysis. Groups with small email lists had much higher open and click-through rates and had double the email fundraising response rate of bigger nonprofits.  But Small groups also had double the unsubscribe rate of their larger peers.

Mission-Based Market Share:  When it comes to the share of online revenue attributable to different types of gift programs – such as monthly giving, one time gifts and tribute gifts – our results showed marked differences across sectors.  Whereas Environmental nonprofits in our study raised 96% of their online revenue from one-time gifts, Health nonprofits raised 50% of their online revenue from “other” gifts (including event giving) and tribute gifts, and International groups lead the way through monthly giving, which made up more than 25% of their online revenue.

Click-Through to Success:  The largest difference between high and low performing email programs in our study was seen in email click-through rates.  So, if you’re looking to emulate the most successful email programs in our study, then work to improve your click-through rates!

Services like SugarSync serve in many ways as personal clouds that people use for their own work. They seem like plain vanilla services but that as well is the benefit the services provide. They are very simple to use. Data is automatically backed up to the cloud.

Sooner or later most of us need to collect some Internet statistics. Maybe it is for your homework, maybe it is for a market research you are doing for a project, maybe it is just out of curiosity. Over the years I came across several websites that provide these stats, and I decided to list the best ones in this post.

So you have somehow begged, borrowed or stolen an email list of 1000 users who you believe are interested in your new service. Would it not be great if you could somehow convert that list into real people, with real photos, and perhaps even more concrete information like "My service has a higher than average gay consumer group" or "My dating service seems to be very popular among 9 year old girls"? Such information can help you correct course before you are too invested in a particular idea you have.

These reductions in privacy protection have significant negative consequences for activists, particularly in repressive regimes where they communicate and affiliate more freely online than they can offline. When Facebook unilaterally removes barriers of privacy, it leaves activists and their contacts open to persecution by authorities.