A thought: There are all these services that will dump personal data (location, exercise, activities, music prefs, “likes”, bookmarks, etc.) into your facebook or twitter stream, but nobody wants to see that crap there. It’s not (generally) social data. It’s useful to collect and aggregate, but only for the individual or perhaps a small circle of friends. Why isn’t there a place where this information can be dumped so it won’t clog the social networks? Like a personal informatics version of a Twitter/Facebook that has no social component but can be tied in to all the APIs easily. #lazyweb
DataJamming.com, inspired by the work I did with my former colleague Paul Blumenthal of the Sunlight Foundation, is a collection of graphics, thoughts, and ideas relating to the realm of publicly available data. — @kerryrm
July 9, 2011
Lazy Sunday LazyWeb Request
June 13, 2011
Visualizar’11: Understanding Infrastructures
“Visualizar’11: Understanding Infrastructures aims to tackle the big questions around infrastructures — the big systems that support global processes such as the production and transportation of energy and water or the provision of global communication and mobility.”
I spoke at Visualizar ‘09, representing Sunlight Foundation. It was an interesting experience. Particularly the part where was I sharing a stage with folks like Aaron Koblin and Stamen.
June 12, 2011
WhereCampDC
I don’t generally write much here, preferring to post graphics and experiments, but I wanted to note that I recently attended WherecampDC. As an outsider at most technical conferences, unconferences, BarCamps, and Hack Days, I’m pretty use to that feeling of not quite fitting in and having very little to offer to the discussion/conversation. That said, this weekend’s WhereCampDC was refreshingly different. Sure, there were cliques, in-jokes and insanely brilliant technical people, but for whatever reason, there was a very welcoming atmosphere. Even the most technical discussion of the weekend (Mapnik!) was fascinating and friendly, if occasionally over my head. So, thanks to whomever organized WhereCampDC. I had a great time.
June 8, 2011
Via Twitter I saw 275,000 Groups Lose Charity Status After Failing to File Paperwork With IRS from the Chronicle of Philanthropy and thought it might make for an interesting choropleth map. I’ve been wanting to set up a very basic workflow for generating simple choropleths in protovis, so this seemed like a good data set and a good opportunity. It took about an hour, but next time it shouldn’t take but a few minutes (in theory).
*Update*
I’ve updated the map now that CO, CT, DE, and NE are included in the data dump from The Chronicle of Philanthropy. Thanks, Lisa!
June 6, 2011
Recently, Sunlight Foundation published the story “The Pentagon’s Big Contractors Lobby Big and Get in Big Trouble”. In this short post about the Top 10 Defense Contractors, they included some interesting Lobbying and Contractor Misconduct data. I was curious to compare the # of misconduct cases that were defense related with the total 2009-2010 lobbying figures. I thought perhaps the higher percentage of “defense contract misconduct” might in some way correlate with higher lobbying dollars. To some extent, I suppose it does, but not quite to the degree I thought it might. (full size graphic)
Disclaimer: While I used to work for Sunlight Foundation, and have done contract work for them in the past, this was created for fun and is in no way an official Sunlight project/graphic.
June 3, 2011
I’ve been meaning to do this for over a year now. I need to stick the code up on Github, but the gist is that it is a US Map generated using SVG & Canvas and Raphaël so you can do fun things when the user hovers over a state. I’ll probably end up making a smaller version, too. It wasn’t hard, just time consuming.
June 3, 2011
@ftrain tweeted about the use of the word “inveterate” in the New York Times and it reminded me of @blprnt’s Processing code, so I fired up Processing and created this for fun.
June 3, 2011
I generated this after all the brouhaha over the iPhone caching your tower location data. I finally just got around to updating my iPhone to the new iOS that deletes that cache and in doing so I was reminded of this. Just posting here so I don’t lose it.
May 21, 2011
Been playing around with Tilemill. Haven’t yet created anything of value, but have been having fun learning the ins and outs. This is a map of DC highlighting the “cycleways” and “paths.” I think the data is out-dated, but it was fun to use CSS to drop out the roads and trunks and highways. I’ve got some ideas for projects, I just need to find the data, and the time.
May 19, 2011
Outside Spending - New York 26th
Last year, I started working on a script that would pull the Outside Spending data from the Sunlight Foundation’s Reporting Group site and build simple pie-charts in protovis for all the races. This data from the special election in NY’s 26th reminded me that I really need to finish that project.
