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."

Google Data Visualization Challenge

Google announced a Data Visualization Challenge yesterday on their blog. Participants will compete to create the best visualization of data on the whatwepayfor.com website. On that website, users can enter their tax return information and have their 2010 taxes broken down by what they were spent on, presumable using the percentages provided by the IRS (eg certain percentages goes to defense, entitlement programs, etc.)

The deadline for entry is March 27, 2011. The top visualization will receive $5,000 and mention on Google's blog. The winner will be announced fittingly enough on April 18, 2011 (tax day).

Digitization project: "Rescuing the Earth's Weather History"

The "Green" blog (of the New York Times) has an entry this week about a few different efforts to digitize archival weather observations so that they can be pulled into computers for anaylsis and perhaps some new resulting ideas about climate.

Read the entry at:

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/rescuing-the-earths-weather-history/?hp

A critical look at Google Scholar citation data

I just stumbled across this article and thought I'd share the link. I must make two points: 1) I must disclose that I work for a company that is a competitor with Google in this field and 2) the author does not balance his criticism with equally detailed criticisms of existing abstracting & indexing services (such as the on I work for). That being said, it's worth reading.

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6703850.html