Community Indicators for Your Community

Real, lasting community change is built around knowing where you are, where you want to be, and whether your efforts are making a difference. Indicators are a necessary ingredient for sustainable change. And the process of selecting community indicators -- who chooses, how they choose, what they choose -- is as important as the data you select.

This is an archive of thoughts I had about indicators and the community indicators movement. Some of the thinking is outdated, and many of the links may have broken over time.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Google Visualization API Released

This is what we've been waiting for ever since Google bought Gapminder. Here's the report from the information aethetics blog:

a new Google Visualization API, based on the powerful visualization techniques from GapMinder. the API is "designed to make it easier for a wide audience to make use of advanced visualization technology, & do so in a way that makes it quick and easy to integrate with new visualizations."
next to the classical methods, the amount of new visualization techniques is quite impressive & include motion charts (a la Gapminder), flashy 3D funnels, pyramids, pie & donuts, time series charts (a la Google Finance), data gauges, geographical heat maps & Gantt charts.


this launch is simultaneous with a recent announcement (googledocs.google.com) from the Google Docs team, who have added support for gadgets & the Visualization API in spreadsheets. this includes a set of gadgets created by Google & several other companies, including some that add pivoting, grouping, & other new visual functionalities.

will this shape the future of data visualization online? if so, how?

[link: code.google.com (visualization API) & code.google.com (visualization gallery) & google-pivot-tables.blogspot.com (Panorama software blog)via google-code-updates.blogspot.com & arstechnica.comthnkx Juan Pablo & Ali]
see also
iGoogle gadgets & Google chart API.

I am way psyched about the possibilities, and hope you are too.

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