Mapumental - useful, data-rich, it rocks!

This is very very cool: Mapumental by MySociety builds data from GoogleMaps, public transport timetables, average house prices and a 'scenicness' game that has built up a pool of data on the most scenic places in Britain, to make (what looks like) a really useable guide on where to live in the UK. It's in private Beta, which I haven't managed to acquire yet, so I've only seen the video. But having seen the video I can't wait. It really is an incredibly useful, straightforward tool that I can see helping a lot of people.
(tip-off from Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing)

That's because we can't remember

While that doesn't surprise me (we as a city either can't remember that far back or we were hammered), I can't believe I haven't seen We Feel Fine before - so this result probably shows that you need to search for US cities to actually find anything interesting.

Comic Relief - what people are saying in real time

This is a post about data visualisation and Comic Relief. It's really not about Twitter...
As the UK gears up for the BBC's massive charity bash tonight, I thought that there might be some interesting Comic Relief style conversations going on. Neoformics data guru Jeff Clark has just released a tool that builds word clouds out of searches on Twitter (covering the last 200 references to a search query) - so allowing you to see in real time exactly what people are saying on Twitter.

Also really interested to see that basic sentiment analysis is included - seems to be at a word level (ie 'awesome' or 'funny' are automatically counted as positive regardless of context, and 'weird' shows up as negative) but any non-human based sentiment analysis is a major development in a free tool. Basically positives show up green and negatives red.

So then you can dig deeper into the data by clicking on any word in the cloud to add it into the search query: this is what 'comic relief weird' looks like
At this level there are much more references to Chris Moyles.

Given the levels of buzz there has been around TV shows in the last few weeks (Heston Blumental and Masterchef are two that I've joined in, and sure that non food geeks are doing this too), this type of application seems perfect to be added into backchannel visualisations from the major broadcasters.

Love, Sleep and Google

Been away for a while and now I'm back. And conveniently a data genius called Yvo Schaap has built this Twitter trend visualizer called TwitterThoughts so that I can see what I've missed. You can track references in a flash interface with all manner of sliders and dropdowns to customise (inluding stuff like total followers who have viewed a meme). and map movement over time (as in the image above). Yvo explains the concept as follows:

TwitterThoughts creates charts based on Twitter tweets in combination with lots of APIs: From a sample of 600 tweets/minute served by the Twitter Api that we send to Yahoo Pipes where it extracts all phrases from the tweet text and the latitude/longitude with use of Yahoo YQL. This Yahoo Pipe outputs serialized PHP back to our local update script that grabs every tweet and phrase and puts it in our MySql database. Daily overviews for fast rendering of the chart data are generated with a daily CRON update. Finally Google Visualization API generates an interactive flash chart based on our JSON data feed.

And it appears what I've mostly missed is love, sleep and google. So pretty much like any other pitch then.
(Hat tip to ReadWriteWeb)

Facebook changes attitude to data after rest of world says no

Facebook's new terms of service slunk back to the C20th this morning after Mark Zuckerberg's apology earlier in the day didn't clear the media storm around the service. It has been replaced by the old (and still highly suspicious) one as a holding position. However, this is a temporary measure until it can be replaced by this:

UPDATE FROM FACEBOOK (IN RESPONSE TO YOUR COMMENTS):
YOU OWN YOUR INFORMATION.
WE DON'T CLAIM RIGHTS TO YOUR PHOTOS OR OTHER CONTENT.
WE WON'T USE ANY INFORMATION YOU SHARE ON FACEBOOK FOR ANYTHING YOU HAVEN'T ASKED US TO.
WE WILL NOT SHARE YOUR INFORMATION IF YOU DEACTIVATE YOUR ACCOUNT.
WE APOLOGIZE FOR ANY CONFUSION AROUND THESE ISSUES.

In other news, the case against Pirate Bay pretty much collapsed on day two after the prosecution admitted they didn't understand how BitTorrent works.

Maybe we can change stuff after all. Let's start in New Zealand

Facebook's attitude to data

Mine, Mine, Mine, Mine

Facebook updated their Terms of Service today, with an amendment that has caused a lot of people to question how worthwhile their FB profile really is. Basically what has happened is that Facebook have used one of their rights as set out in the ToS to change any term that they want to, with no warning or right of appeal. That shouldn't cause anyone any problem, as you all knew they had this right from when you read the ToS back when you signed up, right? Oh.

And the term that they have decided to change is this: it used to say

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof

but importantly it also used to add this:

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

That bit has been removed and replaced with this:

The following sections will survive any termination of your use of the Facebook Service: Prohibited Conduct, User Content, Your Privacy Practices, Gift Credits, Ownership; Proprietary Rights, Licenses, Submissions, User Disputes; Complaints, Indemnity, General Disclaimers, Limitation on Liability, Termination and Changes to the Facebook Service, Arbitration, Governing Law; Venue and Jurisdiction and Other.

So the amendment seems to have changed things from 'we can do what we want with your data until you tell us to stop', to 'we can do what we want with your data forever and you better get used to it'. This is obviously a concern, particularly for for example for musicians who post their tunes and videos on FB - not only is any content posted automatically the property of Facebook, but this amendment removes any way of regaining it by leaving the network.

Personally I think that there is not enough use of Facebook as a creative community that this change has been made to steal and licence content, and it clearly won't be now, as artists and musicians will surely revert to networks offering fair usage terms. It does raise a question about data and the internet though. The C20th record label business has fought for ten years to continue to 'own' data that costs nothing to store or distribute, It also refers regularly to people stealing content by using P2P networks and BitTorrent, and as of today is back in court in Sweden trying to close down PirateBay for breach of copyright on a global scale.

Although on the one hand you have an out-of-date business model trying to stem the inevitable flow of data into the public domain, and on the other a behemoth of the internet age struggling to live up to its venture capital billing, these cases are similar. If data is free and in the public domain, then anyone can use it for whatever reason. If we put a caveat on that such as 'whatever legal reason', then the record companies are in the right, as copyright is part of all [western] legal systems. If we support PirateBay, then the argument follows that Facebook can have all the pretty pictures that we have given them of our own free will and do what they want with them.

And by and large I think I agree with the second part - if we choose to hand over data rights in return for a really really easy way to share it with our friends, then we shouldn't be overconcerned about what Facebook does with it. With the very very important addition that we should also be able to ask for that right back at any point. So up till now Facebook data rights has been a fair trade - I wouldn't upload my own music on there, but I can see the cost/benefit if I did. But now it seems suspicious.

Still not sure about whether it is any worse that what we've done to record companies - however, I also don't care, as they profiteered from me and every other music fan for 50 years (actually only about 25 for me specifically - I'm not THAT old). And that is the other important point, because at the end of the day this isn't something that is going to be ruled on by a judge or a barrister. If Facebook has gone too far here, we will be the judge. We will either use it or not use it - another bit of breaking news today showing how it can be done: the campaign against New Zealand's repressive copyright laws shows both the depth of feeling and the impact of having @stephenfry get behind your campaign. And I think that that is the difference - no-one will line up to save the record business because no-one cares. They were just a middleman. The difference is not one between data being free or owned, it is between people caring and not caring. If we care about data privacy, we will use the network that Facebook has created to make a change (as seen in Beacon), in the same way that data has fought to be free of the clutches of the record industry. If not, then it probably wasn't that important.
(Hat tips to Mashable and Stephen Fry for sources)

More Jeff Clark

More funky stuff by Jeff Clark, who also designed Twitter Streamgraphs. Digg Trends has a really customisable interface, so that by picking on the Auto category, I could concentrate on trends in environmental motoring categories at a keyword level.

Now although data visualisation apps are fun, they aren't much use unless there is something to illustrate, so here I've mashed in the price of oil over the same period (the white trend line).

I think I could get most of this info out of Google Trends, but the interface here is just so much easier

The difference a day makes

Did something happen to the Conservative leadership between Monday afternoon and Tuesday?

I've been playing around with data visualisation tools this week, and found this app that shows the contrast between Osborne's confrontantional 'blame Brown for everything' speech on Monday, and Cameron's 'Work together to beat the crisis' piece yesterday.

Shared text column in the middle is all the stuff you'd expect - "financial", "crisis", "money", etc. The differences are where it gets interesting: Osborne on the left (not a phrase I expect to hear too often) is focused on Brown, with the main references being 'borrowing', 'pounds' and 'taxes'. Cameron's text is focused on 'safe', 'security' and 'value', but the most interesting difference is in the use of verbs - 'Stop' and 'Tax' being Osborne's main uniques references, while Cameron, in direct contrast, wants to 'understand' and 'pass'.

Obviously this is an easy contrast to pick on: I'm not doing anything that Newsnight and Today haven't already done other than make a pretty pattern out of it. But as someone who is routinely putting media packs or client briefs into Wordle to pick up on things that the authors might have missed, there's some great cross referencing to be done here. For instance, what about it you could compare the tag clouds of two brands on Brand Tags.