Big Data as Engine of Innovation?

An article in the New York Times this week talks about how Big Data will drive innovation in the next few years, likening its effect to the impact of computers on business over the last few decades, or even the effect of coal on the early industrial economy:

"Data is a vital raw material of the information economy, much as coal and iron ore were in the Industrial Revolution," the article proclaims. "But the business world is just beginning to learn how to process it all."

Here's the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/13/technology/13data.html

Is Delicious the Next Discovery Engine?

This article in Search Engine Watch notes that Delicious (www.delicious.com), which was recently purchased from Yahoo by the co-founders of YouTube, has the potential to be a next generation search engine. Why? Because we are more likely to look at content that has been pre-filtered and flagged by our friends, family, and colleagues. For example as a software engineer I may be looking for information about a new feature the Java programming language. If I search the term in delicious, I will find many links that have been tagged with that term.

Here's the link:

Is Delicious the Next Discovery Engine?

"Information design"

Nice article in the New York Times about "Information Design," i.e. Information Visualization:


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/business/03stream.html

A periodic table of Google APIs

Google now offers so many APIs and services that it is difficult to keep track of them all, or to even take heed when new ones are offered. Google's engineers may have realized that this is a problem, because they have recently created a nice place to see all of these APIs and services in one glance.

In January, the folks over at Google Code posted this "periodic table of APIS" graphic to allow you to see all of Google's API endeavors at once. Pay special attention to the buttons on the top of the page -- when you mouse over each one (eg Mobile, Data APIs, etc), the corresponding APIs in the table below are highlighted. Clicking on one of the individual "elements" will take you to a page that describes that particular API.

Check it out here:
http://code.google.com/more/table/

Google NGrams

There are so many things going on in Google Labs that sometimes you can find yourself stumbling upon an interesting creation from them that you had missed. I discovered Google N-Grams while reading a post in Alexis Madrigal's blog in The Atlantic.

NGrams searches the occurrences of a word (or a comma delimited list of words) in Google Books from the year 1800 to the present and plots their frequency on a graph. You can start playing with it here: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/

Here is a sample experiment to get you started: type "selfish,selfless" into the search box, click search, and then view the results.

If You Bought Apple Stock Instead of Products

The Bits blog in the New York Times this week related some amusing research on how you would have fared if back in the day you had purchased Apple stock instead of Apple products:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/10/if-you-bought-apple-stock-instead-of-products/

Have a good weekend and don't lose too much sleep over What Might Have Been ... ;-)

Update to Google Public Data Explorer: Visualize Your Own Data

Google recently released an update to their Public Data Explorer that now allows you to upload your own data in addition the canned datasets that Google had on the site.



In conjunction with this update is the release of the Dataset Publishing Language (DSPL) format which allows you to mark up your data so that Google can slurp it in and create visualizations of it.

With this release, Google hopes that "more datasets can come to life through Public Data Explorer visualisations and enable people to better understand the world around them and make more informed, data-driven decisions."