Our ‘Best City in the World’ contest in partnership with the Economist Intelligence Unit forges ahead — there’s only three weekends left to submit your entry! The deadline fast approaches: March 4, 2012. If you’ve got data visualization skills and urban design knowledge to show off, don’t let the chance to redefine city liveability and win $10,000 slip past you. 

Some quick updates on the contest:

1) Eager data-visualization enthusiasts continue to iterate on the EIU’s liveability data sets on our Best City Contest topic page, mining for interesting and telling trends:

Some very interesting ways of interpreting the data are popping up — follow along and join the discussion!

2) One contestant recently asked us a question regarding climate vs. weather indicators in the EIU’s liveability index:

At “Category 3: Culture and environment” in the document “About Liveability Survey.doc”, the indicator Humidity/temperature rating is mentioned.

This indicator does not appear in the (liveability) spreadsheet, instead there is a “Climate rating” indicator.

Does this indicator relate climate in the sense of weather, and in that case which factors is this indicator taking into account?

EIU Cost of Living editor Jon Copestake clarified as follows:

“The climate category has two indicators: a general comfort indicators supplied by the correspondent and also a quantitative indicator calculated from average weather conditions. The enquirer is right - these are the same indicator.”

To help further clarify, Copestake also passed along the EIU’s climate scoring methodology, which is now found under “Attachments” of the EIU’s contest liveability index data set.  

The EIU has been very open to answering contestant inquiries as completely as possible, so do take advantage! If you have a question, ask Copestake directly through a BuzzData private message or ask us at contest@buzzdata.com. 

BuzzData is hosting a panel talk tonight called “How social data can change the world” at the Centre for Social Innovation (215 Spadina Ave., 4th floor). Come hear speakers at the forefront of data communication talk about:

1) the significance of sharing data and connecting data to people

2) the challenges and risks of the data-sharing business model

3) how social principles are key to driving (and scaling) data-driven innovation 

Our panel of speakers:

• Glen McGregor (Data Journalist, The Ottawa Citizen)
• Motek Sherman (Lawyer / Angel Investor / Media Producer)
• Momoko Price (Communications Director, BuzzData)
• Kieran Huggins (Co-creator, MyTTC.ca)

More details can be read here. Looking forward to a stimulating evening! See you there!

The Atlantic Cities just posted an interview with one of the judges of our Best City in the World contest, EIU Cost of Living editor Jon Copestake:

Another great related article to read on the subject, also in The Atlantic Cities, is “Why Ranking Cities is Such a Tricky Business,” by Toronto-based Globe and Mail writer John Lorinc, who lays out the pitfalls and oversights that can occur with international city ranking press coverage. 

Would love to hear people’s thoughts on the EIU’s new open-market, open-data approach to encouraging new methods for measuring liveability, in light of Lorinc’s piece. With data enthusiasts already dabbling with different techniques on our real-time Best City Contest topic page, things are already getting interesting. 

Want to throw your hat in the ring? Watch our submission guide video, and check out the contest details. 

-Momoko Price (momoko@buzzdata.com)

Hello and Happy Holidays from everyone at BuzzData!

The new year is fast approaching, but we couldn’t help but push a few more new features to the site before 2011 officially comes to an end. Without further ado, here are the latest and greatest improvements we’d like you to know about:

Dataset and user profile badges to add to your websites

We have just released a set of customizable publishing badges  you can now embed into other website(s), thus instantly increasing the visibility and reach of the data you generate.

Whether you want to use them on a personal blog or a company homepage, BuzzData badges make it easier than ever to share your data with the world.

Adding badges to your website  requires simply copy-and-pasting a few code snippets into your webpage source code. You can learn all about how to add badges to your website in our new FAQ & Knowledge Base. Try them out and let us know what you think!

Tweet, share and ‘like’ datasets

Now sharing data with your social circle is as easy as a single mouse click. Want your social media followers and friends to be able to download cool data you find on BuzzData? Get the data into the Twittersphere in an instant.

Community Tasks

This is an early-stage community feature we’re quite excited about. Now whenever you create a new dataset on BuzzData, you can write in tasks  that you’d like help with from others in the  dataset’s Overview tab.

So what? Well, if your dataset is public, it will show up in our new global “Tasks” webpage, located just to the left of the BuzzData search box, along with the tasks you need help with.

The Tasks page is where users can peruse unfinished data projects from around the world that they can contribute to, thus helping the data community work together to achieve their goals.

To illustrate, when creating a dataset:

The global Tasks page is an early-stage feature that will continue to evolve in 2012. We hope you make use of it often and let us know how we can make it better by emailing us at support@buzzdata.com.

Now accepting direct image uploads and video URLs

Have you made a visualization of your dataset on your desktop and want to upload an image or video of it in action? No problem, you can now upload image files directly to the site and view them in our new visualization viewer.

In addition, BuzzData’s visualization viewer now allows you to post and stream videos from a variety of popular content providers such as Youtube, Vimeo and BrightCove, so you can showcase videos of interactive visualizations and other media on BuzzData as well.

Alright that’s it for now! We hope you have a lovely, stress-free winter break and a fun-filled New Years’ Eve!

The BuzzData Team

Are you ready for International Open Data Hackathon Day on December 3?

This year it’s easier than ever to put your open-data efforts in the spotlight for all to see. BuzzData makes publishing and coordinating your hackathon projects a snap.

Here are 6 great reasons to use BuzzData to organize your HackFest 2011 projects:

1) BuzzData has an easy-to-use interface that non-coders can contribute to.

This is important for making HackFest as inclusive as possible, and engaging journalists, politicians and the general public. It’s all well and good to encourage everyone to participate, but if your Mom doesn’t know how to use ScraperWiki or read Python, chances are you’re going to have a hard time getting her interested in your open-data project unless we lower the tech barrier a bit.

BuzzData lets you publish data with plenty of room to explain its significance, where it came from, and what you plan to do with it in plain English. Anyone can add their $0.02 to your work and join in the discussion. People who might not necessarily know how to make an app with your data could still very easily look it over and come up with ideas on what to do with it next. 

2) BuzzData accepts ANY file type under 500MB.

That’s right - BuzzData lets you upload just about any file, as long as it’s under the file size limit. So bring your .pdfs, .docs and GIS data on board — it’s a one-stop drag & drop, easy enough for anyone to use.

3) BuzzData’s versioning tracks who did what to the data.

What better way to show the evolution of a data source from unusable .pdf to a nice clean dataset than by uploading the original source file and adding subsequent versions on top (no need for extra file names or cluttered FTP servers)?

This is also a great way to get a poorly formatted data source online and solicit help from people to clean it up. Just upload it to BD and share it with your community!

4) BuzzData lets you clone and link datasets.

If you see some data on BuzzData you’d like to work on yourself, clone it and build your own Hack Day project with it. By cloning the data, you preserve its connection to the original source, thus helping others keep track of how the data is evolving and where it originally came from.

You can also link unrelated datasets to each other so that others can keep track of which datasets you’re using for a single project.

5) BuzzData has a public API for developers.

For developers who want to pull and update data quickly, BuzzData also has a beta API on Github, which you can use as a no-muss, no-fuss data-storage target for your open-data apps. (BuzzData users can access their API keys under their Profile Settings.)

6) This year, BuzzData has a real-time updating public page for HackFest 2011!

We’ve created a HackFest 2011 (odhd) Topic page on BuzzData! Now when you publish ODHD-related datasets you plan to work during the event, you can tag it with the “HackFest 2011” topic and it will be added to this page, which you and your friends can follow to stay updated on the day’s developments.

Are you excited yet? We are! Get moving and get your HackFest 2011 data & projects on BuzzData!

Learn all about how to use BuzzData to put your data projects in the spotlight. 

And don’t forget to tag your data with the ‘Hackfest 2011’ topic on BuzzData so it gets added to our live HackFest 2011 activity feed and public page!

Have fun on Hack Day!

The BuzzData Team

We’ve pushed through more changes to BuzzData, making it more versatile and vibrant than ever. Take a moment to sign in and see what’s new. Don’t have time right now? Here’s a quick rundown of our latest and greatest new features:

i. Upload any file type — yes, any file type — to BuzzData

Working with GIS or RDB data? Stuck with a PDF and need to request help scraping it? No problem. If it’s under 500MB, we’ll accept it. 

Previews of your data wiill still be limited to tabular data only (.xls, .csv, .tsv), but will be available for more formats in the future. 

ii. Annotate the latest changes to your data

BuzzData now prompts you to add release notes every time you update a new version to your data, so your team can easily keep track of how your data is evolving. Why email spreadsheets and lose track of your workflow? Drag, drop, annotate and invite. It’s just that easy.

iii. Use @username to direct your comments and replies

We all know how convenient @username tagging is for communicating with our friends online. Now you can ensure the right person gets your message the same way you would on Facebook or Twitter. 

And here’s more news from BuzzData:

Deadline for our latest data-storytelling contest is Dec. 2!

Can you spin stories out of data? Prove it! This month’s contest includes prison contraband data, U.S. election disbursement data and Canadian charity tax filing data. Who wouldn’t want to crunch it?

Read this to see which datasets have been selected for story-telling and how to register and submit your work. 

Looking for data? Check our BuzzTopics!

BuzzData now has nearly 1,000 staff-curated datasets available for those people looking for clean data to mash up, visualize or just have on-hand. For the full list of topics, read this. 

Okay, that’s all for now!

The BuzzData Team

Digital newsrooms at the Ottawa Citizen and OpenFile decided to use technology to help connect their readers to our war-torn past this Remembrance Day.

@Wearethedead is a bot created by Ottawa Citizen data journalist Glen McGregor that tweets one fallen Canadian soldier on the 11th minute of every hour. Excluding any updates from today onward, it will take 13 years to tweet the entire database. 

You can read more about how McGregor came up with the idea in the Ottawa Citizen blog post here. 

Each tweet includes the name, position, date and location of death, and age of the soldier who died. 

OpenFile’s Poppy File  is a data-driven historical retrospective on Canadian veterans that has blossomed from a simple map only a year ago into a beautiful, popular interactive series that allows viewers to discover the identities of soldiers killed in war who once lived in their neighbourhoods, in addition to touching personal narratives and summary charts.

Lovely to see newsmedia using technology creatively to help us connect to an increasingly distant past. 

-Momoko Price

Have you joined BuzzData and then gotten a bit stuck because, well, you have no datasets to work on yet? Don’t fret — we heard you.

 We don’t want users who are intrigued by (but new to) data to be held back, and so took it upon ourselves to track down, collect and clean up BuzzData-curated public data for you to play with and explore. BuzzTopics will be a treasure trove to info-viz enthusiasts especially, who want good clean data with which they can hone their evolving viz-tool skills.

We will be focusing on building our discovery and search capabilities further on down the line (we know it’s a bit of a thorn in people’s sides right now, don’t worry, we’ll get to it), in the meantime you can get the full list of BuzzTopics available by searching for “Buzz” in the search box at top right:

“We made sure that we were going to all the right places, to publishers that had high-quality data,” says BuzzData business analyst Anthony Ilukwe, who published nearly a thousand datasets with the help of three others in a fairly short time span.

Below is the full list of BuzzTopics so far — this is just a start and it will continue to grow. And if you have requests for data, ping us at blog@buzzdata.com and we’ll track it down. Have fun!

BuzzEducation

 55 Datasets, including: Lists of Colleges & Universities, Periodic Table of Elements, List of U.S. presidents & more.

BuzzGeography

10 datasets, including: coastline per nation, tallest mountains, highest & lowest points per country. 

 BuzzBusiness

184 datasets, including: GDP per nation/industry, government subsidies & employee compensation per industry, cost depreciation of durable goods, etc.

 BuzzCanada

22 datasets, including: population by year, aboriginal income, language prevalence, certified organic products, charitable donations by province.

 BuzzDemography

26 datasets, including: global populations, birth and mortality rates, urban data, age demographics by country, migration rates; literacy data.

 BuzzEnvironment

34 datasets, including: CO2 emissions per fuel source, threatened plant and animal species, forest area.

 BuzzNYC

55 datasets, including: locations of daycare centres, water fountains, showers, firehouses, subway entrances, etc., birthnames of NYC citizens, district demographics.

BuzzGolf

3 datasets, including: strokes by golfer, pro career earnings, driving accuracy.

BuzzAuto

15 datasets, including: fuel efficiency by model and manufacturer, vehicles in circulation by country, car production per country.

BuzzScience

12 datasets, including: volcanoes around the world, the Periodic Table of Elements, inventions and discoveries; list of constellations.

BuzzMovies

27 datasets, including: cinematographer earnings, bestselling DVDs of all time, worst movie by viewer rating.

BuzzSoccer

55 datasets, including: player discipline by year, top scorers by year, World Cup and Euro Cup winners.

BuzzCricket

53 datasets, including: batting averages, series results.

BuzzRugby

38 datasets, including: Guiness Premiership, player stats, Six Nations results.

BuzzHealth

20 datasets, including: life expectancy, infant mortality rates, HIV/AIDS prevalence, birth and death rates.

BuzzChicago

15 datasets, including: crime incidents, sex offenders, locations of hotels, health clinics, police stations, community centres, etc.

BuzzWeather

150 datasets, including: monthly average weather by various regions.

BuzzHistory

10 datasets, including: most populous cities at different periods in time, lists of U.S. and Canadian leaders.

BuzzHockey

56 datasets, including: draft entries by year, Stanley Cup and other trophy winners.

BuzzEngineering

14 datasets, including: conversion tables, engineering industry demographics.

BuzzFootball

52 datasets, including: passing, receiving and rushing leaders by year, standings, offense and defense statistics, Super Bowl MVPs.

BuzzCalifornia

22 datasets, including: vacancy rates, state revenue, list of schools and hospitals, electricity consumption, fatal collisions, race and ethnic projections, employment data.

-Momoko Price

Fantastic article (as usual) on the Guardian Datablog today — Simon Rogers and his team illustrate how the prevalence of poverty in the United States has gone up nearly 6.5% now that the U.S. Census Bureau has updated its evaluation methods. 

Read the full article and see the visualizations

While the Fusion Tables map is cool, the clustered-column chart comparisons of how poverty has increased or decreased by age group, region and more is very illuminating. Definitely worth a full read. 

-Momoko Price