Friday, March 6, 2009

Google Visualization API

The Google Visualization API allows you to display "structured" data using a variety of different visualizations.

An overview and documentation is available at: http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/. You can view some samples at the Google Ajax APIs Playground. Some of the interesting examples include an annotated timeline and a motion chart (of the housing price index against the unemployment rate).

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Data Rot on Sunday Morning

David Pogue did a piece about "data rot" on CBS's Sunday Morning this weekend. In case you are not familiar with the term, it means the process by which data formats and hardware become outmoded or physically deteriorate over time, thus rendering the data on them unrecoverable. One woman in the segment talks about how she can't watch her first movie for film school as there are no longer any machines to play it on -- even though school was not that long ago for her. Also, the CIO for the Library of Congress was interviewed about LOC's efforts to preserve historical and culturally significant information.

Check out the story at the CBS news website.