A quick roundup of bits and pieces around the Web which have caught our attention at Timetric Towers this week:
How the Guardian is pioneering data journalism with new tools — Simon Rogers, editor of the Guardian Data Blog, talks about the tools he uses to produce what, for our money, is one of the most forward-thinking bits of newspaperland. Of course, we're biased…
“Okay, so this is the data blog today. So obviously we’ve got Afghanistan at the top. Afghanistan is often at the top at the moment. This is a full list of everybody who’s died, every British casualty who’s died and been wounded over time. So you’ve got this data here. We use, I tend to use a lot of third party services. This is a company called Timetric, who are very good at visualizing time series data. It takes about five minutes to create that, and you can roll over and get more information.”
…but it’s definitely worth your time to watch this if you're interested in where journalism's going. (You might be interested in this SxSW panel too.)
From Simon, Florence Nightingale: data visualization pioneer.
Some counterpoint to that: lies, damn lies and visualizations, from O’Reilly Radar.
Real-time charts, from Tom Taylor, of your odds of getting a bike from London's new bike hire scheme. Our local station's the 13th busiest.
Young Rewired State was last week, and as ever, the kids put us all to shame. We're really proud to have been sponsors, and we wish we'd thought of GovSpark, a real-time monitor of the electricity usage of government departments, first!
The Economist's daily charts are really well done. They've been tracking the price of breakfast, which is shooting up thanks to a global wheat shortage. Our suggestion's to treat yourself to a fried breakfast:
On a very different area of economics, Asymco — a new blog, largely writing about the mobile phone market. It's using data really, really smartly; this post on Nokia's woes, for instance.
Slate’s been doing a bunch of terrific long-form writing. It’s the kind of writing Instapaper's made for. This family of essays on risk by John Dickerson is a great example.
