Lovely site with the mission "to make an infographic on every This American Life ever made." A noble cause if ever there was one.

This is a neat use of data that's just sitting there. When you connect to the Internet you have an IP address. This has some very rough location data associated with it. Someone has discovered IP addresses are exposed when you use Chatroulette and mapped a bunch of them giving a sketch of where people are chatrouletting.

For mashups and the like

I think I saw this in the distribution of Twitter users over Supersonic. I have no idea what to do with this piece of knowledge though. "Lotka's law is one of a variety of special applications of Zipf's law. It describes the frequency of publication by authors in any given field. It states that [...] the number of authors publishing a certain number of articles is a fixed ratio to the number of authors publishing a single article. As the number of articles published increases, authors producing that many publications become less frequent. There are 1/4 as many authors publishing two articles within a specified time period as there are single-publication authors, 1/9 as many publishing three articles, 1/16 as many publishing four articles, etc. Though the law itself covers many disciplines, the actual ratios involved (as a function of 'a') are very discipline-specific."

Interesting, not just for the tips but as an illustration that there's more than one way to access data in a service. I'm reminded of how I used to search for bands on MySpace using Google partly because MySpace's search was so torturous but also because the way Google ranks pages usually bubbled the bands above the non-band pages.

Neil digs into the Supersonic Twitter archive for patterns and such. More to come

My first post to the Birmingham Post's blog in ages in which I call on mobile phone companies to be reclassified as ISPs and for voice and txt to be billed as data, which is what they are.

integrated into Google Maps. Nice interface too. Not of much use to me but I'm sure the local history buffs will get all excited by this.

is a cool looking iPhone racing game that you play by tipping the phone from side to side. But as someone who doesn't really play games (for the same reason I don't use heroin - I'd never get anything done) what interests me is the part where it can take the raw data from your game and create a video which is then posted automatically to YouTube. The potential application of that sort of process is mindboggling (GPS + Google Earth = video flythrough of your walk, for example.)

Mashing up LastFM and Amazon data into a recommends RSS feed.