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.

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.

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.)

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.

Cancer Data? Sorry, Can’t Have It - New York Times

In Cancer Data? Sorry, Can’t Have It: Dr. Andrew Vickers weighs in against the common practice by cancer researchers of refusing to release clinical trials data.

When medical research is funded by public dollars, the results of that research (minus personal patient information) should absolutely be made available to the public for independent review and analysis. Making public data disclosure the common practice will require a major change of behavior, but it’s inevitable.

Cite your sources - kudos to Tax Policy Center

The Tax Policy Center has released their Tax Policy Briefing Book for 2008. This covers questions related to tax and budget policy that are likely to come up during the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

Like many reports of this sort, the briefing book includes plenty of charts. However this report is unusual in that all of the charts include full citations of their original data sources, with complete URLs, and also links to downloadable Excel spreadsheets with the raw data used to create the charts.

Kudos to the Tax Policy Center for their thoroughness in citing sources. I hope we’ll see other organizations doing this in the future.