Visualization services are stagnating

Activity on all the leading online data visualization sites appears to have plateaued.

Data360 has received no new data contributions in several months. The site is currently under a comment spam attack which they seem unable to repel.

Swivel is entirely focused on their private service for business customers. Almost all the new activity on swivel.com over the last couple of weeks has been in the form of data contributions by a single customer.

GraphWise has gone nowhere since their launch last year.

Many Eyes continues to get steady user traffic and new contributions, but commenting activity is down.

These sites have huge potential for encouraging online collaboration, but that potential has not been realized yet. What’s missing?

Cognitive Surplus

Clay Shirky discusses cognitive surplus in his recent speech at Web 2.0, promoting his latest book, Here Comes Everybody.

Shirky’s point is the gradual replacement of passive media consumption (watching TV) with participatory media (Wikipedia, blogs).

Online data analysis services are in a similar position to where social software and services were several years ago. The promise is the replacement of passive consumption of data analysis (reading the paper, watching TV) with participatory analysis. Instead of waiting for someone designated as an expert to make a pronouncement concerning some new piece of data, we’ll all be able to inquire, explore and analyze such information ourselves, and to share our findings with others.

Datamob identifies public data producers and consumers

Lauren Sperber and Sean Flannagan have launched Datamob, a site that identifies sources of public data and web services that consume and present that data in interesting ways.

Swivel announces business dashboard service

Swivel has made the first public announcement of their private service for business customers.

The service is not open for general use, but the screenshots on their site give a good indication of the feature set. The chart visualizations are completely different from swivel.com. A much crisper look, done either in Flash (like Google Finance or AJAX (like Timepedia’s Chronoscope). Collaboration capabilities appear to be limited to annotation of individual data points. Much of the other screen clutter present on swivel.com is gone.

This is clearly a change of focus for Swivel. Swivel Business appears to be a hosted business dashboard service rather than a general-purpose data visualization service. This could be a low-end competitor to vendors who provide online dashboard services through hosted versions of commercial business intelligence software.

No mention of whether the new charting function or other features will be made available to swivel.com users.

infochimps

The latest arrival on the data-aggregation scene is infochimps.org, by Philip Kromer at the University of Texas in Austin. Infochimps is most similar to Numbrary

This site is clean and well organized. Tagging of datasets is quite thorough. A unique feature to infochimps is recognition of data fields across sources, so you could find, for instance, all sources that have figures for “Personal Income”. So far I’ve been unable to find any fields that actually appear in multiple sources, but this is presumably just a matter of adding metadata to datasets in the repository.

There’s no online viewing of dataset contents, but every dataset is available in (compressed) CSV, YAML and Excel formats. All the reformatting of the source data has been done by infochimps, saving users from repeating this chore. Like Numbrary, infochimps provides links to the source documents that were used to construct the datasets on the site.

So far infochimps has accumulated almost 1,500 datasets, and many more are promised on their blog.

Opinion on future prospects for Swivel and Many Eyes

Steve Few blogged over a year ago with reviews of two public data visualization services, Swivel and Many Eyes. Steve expressed a strong preference for the quality of the visualizations produced by Many Eyes.

Over the past three months, daily Many Eyes contributions have outpaced Swivel contributions by 5 to 1 or more. The gap is widening: Swivel contributions are declining, and Many Eyes contributions are increasing.

My congratulations to Many Eyes for growing their user base, but there’s still a long way to go. Even at a rate approaching a hundred new contributions per day on the site, this level of user-generated activity is low compared to other online collaborative environments that are perceived as “successful”. I group data visualization services with other services that allow participants to complete useful work in a collaborative fashion - LinkedIn and SourceForge are examples of this. Many Eyes is not getting enough traffic to sustain the site as anything other than the research project that it is.

My conclusions, in brief:

• Swivel is doing poorly, and could fail before the end of 2008.
• Neither Swivel or Many Eyes are not sufficiently compelling to users for these sites to be self-sustaining.

Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media: GapMinder: The Opportunity

Matthew Hurst of Microsoft Live Labs reports on a Trendalyzer presentation by Ola Rosling at O’Reilly’s Competitive Intelligence Foo Camp in February.

Rosling gave little information on Google’s plans for the Trendalyzer software, but it appears that these plans do not include community participation in any way. I agree with Matt that this is unfortunate. Collaborative analysis can’t happen without collaboration.

Peter Murray-Rust and the data-mining robots

Peter Murray-Rust is working to harvest crystallography data from research papers published on the web and make the aggregated data available online.

(Via Open Data Commons.)

Public Economic Indicators site saved from shutdown

Economic Indicators.gov reports that the site will not be terminated as announced previously:

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economics and Statistics Administration (ESA) has decided to continue the economicindicators.gov website. Featuring the economic releases from ESA’s Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the site was started by this Administration in 2002 to give greater awareness to these economic statistics. ESA initially planned to discontinue the service due to cost concerns but given the feedback ESA received, the decision has been made to continue the site and improve its functionality.

The Economic Indicators site is merely a list of links to economic news releases from two federal agencies, the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis, but such cross-agency aggregation points are rare enough as it is. Perhaps they’ll add additional sources of economic news releases (such as the Federal Reserve and Bureau of Labor Statistics) in the future.

(Via OMB Watch.)

Gapminder - Video: Gapcasts

Hans Rosling’s 2006 and 2007 presentations at TED have received a lot of coverage in the blogosphere, but that’s not all that Prof. Rosling has to say. Check out the Gapcast video series from Gapminder for several more presentations on human development issues around the world.

It appears that all of these presentations were created using the same version of the Trendalyzer software that was put out before Google acquired the technology last year. Google has been silent on their plans for Trendalyzer, though there has been some coverage of plans to host large quantities of scientific research data on Google servers, possibly involving some use of Trendalyzer for visualization of these large datasets.