Are people really moving into Seattle?
Forbes recently published a visualization based on IRS data which shows where Americans moved between 2008 and 2009. You click on the city name that you are interested in and it shows you a dense sets of lines showing migration paths. Red lines show that there was a net number of people moving out whereas black lines show a net number of people moving in. It's interesting to look at, but really really hard to read, and almost useless due to that. But that's a different story.
I found it interesting to compare this data with the temperature heatmap of that day. We have had an awfully cold spring but this heatmap really drives in the point. That week, the Pacific Northwest was the coldest region in the country! Makes one wonder, if people really are moving to Seattle in hordes, do they really know what they are getting into?
Facebook friends visualization tool for Many Eyes
I wrote a small Facebook application that scans your friends list and finds how they are related to each other. It prepares the data in a format compatible with Many Eyes. You can visualize this data in Many Eyes to see the connections between your friends.
About the visualization: The people on the left are my high school friends, the dense nodes on the right are my current grad school friends and people on the fringes are college friends and other common friends.
Please head over to http://apps.facebook.com/manyeyes/ and visualize your data. I would love to see what other's people's data looks like!
This also opens up another interesting dilemma: I accessed information about my friends since I am their friend and they know that I can access it. But I am sure they do not expect me to make a text dump of it and visualize it on a publicly viewable website. I have been thinking hard about my right to do so or their incorrect expectation in this regard. I trust my friends with my information. But if they are not trustworthy, the only thing I can do about that is remove them from my list - this the advice Facebook itself gives to get rid of stalkers and bad wall-posters. I am very interested in hearing from my friends (it's your data in this visualization) about what they think about this.
[Edit: You might find the following applications interesting as well:
- Friend Wheel - Creates a wheel with connected dots between your friends
- Friend Explorer - Helps you graph out your friendships]
Visualize your WordPress activity using the Many Eyes plugin
Do you want to see how chatty you have been in the blogosphere? Is there a trend in your periods of lull and heavy activity?
I wrote a plugin that helps convert information about your blog posts into data compatible with Many Eyes. You can install this plugin onto your WordPress installation and then you are just one click away from creating a visualization that looks like the one below:
According to my stats, I've been very active in the August of 2005! How about you?
You can download the Many Eyes Data Exctractor plugin from here.
Installation Instructions:
- Unzip to your wp-contents/plugins directory
- Login to to your WordPress admin area - usually <your-blog-uri>/wp-admin/
- Click on Plugins and activate the Many Eyes Data Exctractor plugin
- Click on Manage
- Click on the Visualize tab
Visualization: Lyricist Sameer’s Word Power
Bollywood's famous lyrics writer, Sameer , uses the words "gaya", "main", "dil", "pyaar", "sanam" and "mehbooba" the most! Why am I not surprised!
Translations
- gaya = went (used as an auxillary verb)
- main = "I"
- dil = heart
- pyaar = love
- sanam, mehbooba = sweetheart
