The blog has been a bit quiet lately (to the disappointment of very few, I’m sure) — but we’ve been releasing apps and blogging furiously over at our team site. Here’s a roundup of our recent posts:
Tools we love to use
Quick-install Python/PostGIS geo stack on Snow Leopard
Deploying ProPublica’s awesome table-setter tables to S3 using Fabric
Quickly [...]
Google rolled out a simple little feature today: enter “unemployment rate wayne county” and they’ll offer you a chart. Click it, and you’ll see the unemployment rate since 1990, and be able to add other counties to compare. It ain’t much, but it’s neat.
Now, unemployment data *is* take-my-shirt-off-WOO-HOO-high-five thrilling, but this’ll get much more interesting [...]
Rich Gordon’s got programmers but no project:
Between now and when the [next Medill innovation project] starts (Sept. 23), we have to decide what the focus of the project will be. In my experience with previous projects, the key is to come up with an interesting challenge or question for the students to explore.
Right now there [...]
My comrade in arms Ryan Mark sez:
The Sun-Times published the names, salaries and positions of 145,000 Illinois, Cook County, and Chicago employees on their website this weekend. The names and salaries are online in the form of a simple searchable database.
But the data is buried. There’s no way to get to a spreadsheet of [...]
Quote of the day goes to David Coen: “I wish I could just “command-F” for C.T.C (Cinnamon Toast Crunch).”
Amen! My pinky finger twitches for the “/” key (old-school Firefox shortcut) all the time: when I’m scanning ingredients, reading a news story, and finding my location on a map.
After a taste of what the web [...]
I’ve been on the hunt for quick and dirty ways to show off data: visualization tools that are free, pretty, and easy to embed in a story. Here are my finds so far.
Kick-ass embeddable visualizations
Upload your data set to ManyEyes, and you can turn it into all kinds of neat charts and wacky interactive stuff [...]
From Slashdot:
Adobe systems made an announcement that it has provided technology and information to Google and Yahoo! to help the two search engine rivals index Shockwave Flash (SWF) file formats. …this will provide more relevant search rankings of the millions pieces of flash content.
This is good news
Flash is a terribly popular platform for interactive news, [...]
From the Google News Blog:
Today, we’re happy to announce that Google News is now available to iPhone and iPod Touch users in over 30 countries. This means that you’ll see a full-fledged version of Google News on these devices, improved Google News results and, where available, relevant YouTube videos embedded with news stories.
Google Earth, New York Times Team Up
You can now browse New York Times news based on geography. Has the New York Times become hyperlocal, even though the content may not have that perspective. if all goes according to plan, the news will be updated every 15 minutes.
The Center for Locative Media
As educators and amateur neo-geographers, [...]
Mashable has posted a nice analysis of the newest feature of Google Maps, YouTube videos.
The new feature is slightly different from geotagging photos in Flickr or Picasa, and is also different from the YouTube videos you can find in Google Earth. In those cases, a photo or video is associated with a particular geographic [...]
Posts
