March 2012
5 posts
ATTENTION: THIS BLOG HAS MOVED
Hey everyone, thanks for following BuzzData and checking in on what we do. A quick update: we recently launched a new redesign for our company website:
http://buzzdata.com
This redesign means that new blog content will now show up at:
http://buzzdata.com/content/blog
Eventually this Tumblr will probably disappear. But you always can keep up with BuzzData’s ongoing adventures in data at...
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We're on our way to SXSWi Accelerator!
From the press release:
BuzzData Selected as Finalist for SXSW Accelerator Competition
March 9, 2012, TORONTO, ON — BuzzData, a developer of data-sharing software, announced today that it has been selected as a finalist in the News Related Technologies category for the 4th annual SXSW Accelerator competition.
“We’re honoured to have been selected by SXSW,” BuzzData CEO and co-founder Mark...
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Our contest is over, check out the talent!
Our Best City in the World Contest has come to an end! We’re so excited to start compiling all the submissions and seeing what people came up with. (Backgrounder: in this contest, the Economist Intelligence Unit challenged the world to devise and visualize new ways to rank cities and measure urban liveability.)
You can check out — and in the case of interactive submissions, play with —...
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Data: even if it's not big, it should be clever
I’ve worked with data throughout my career (possibly for my sins). I’m not a data scientist, but even before BuzzData barely a day went by where an Excel spreadsheet or CSV file didn’t end up in my inbox. Sales forecasts, cost-benefit analyses, market research, product test results, benchmark data, P&Ls and other financial data – even my own household budget. Now, given my role at BuzzData,...
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Our Best City Contest deadline is coming ...
Have you been planning to submit a data visualization entry to our Best City in the World Contest and help the Economist Intelligence Unit find new ways to rank the world’s cities? Time is running out — don’t let your chance to win $10,000 slip away.
Submitting your entry correctly involves a few steps; make sure you get it to us properly so your efforts...
February 2012
3 posts
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Best City Contest: only 1 weekend left!
Our ‘Best City in the World’ contest in partnership with the Economist Intelligence Unit forges ahead — there’s only one weekend 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...
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Talk data with us at Social Media Week T.O.!
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...
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The Atlantic picks up our Best City Contest
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...
January 2012
1 post
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WatchBuzzData: making data easy, engaging and effective.
December 2011
2 posts
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Promote your data with our new badges
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...
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6 reasons to use BuzzData for HackFest 2011
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...
November 2011
7 posts
Upload any file type and annotate your changes
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?...
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Mournbots, Poppy Files and Veterans' Day-ta
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...
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Explore hundreds of datasets with BuzzTopics
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...
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Change the data, change the economy
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...
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Now you can track teamwork on BuzzData
Over the next month or so we’ll be releasing waves of subtle improvements and rearrangements to BuzzData’s design, meant to improve team collaboration and user interaction as well as general data workflow. Take a moment to login and play around — we’d love to hear what you think of our ideas!
This week, new features on BuzzData include the following:
1. Collaboration metrics
...
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Datasets for next storytelling contest are up!
Can you spin stories out of data? Prove it.
It was hard to keep the datasets limited to just three this time around, with so many users releasing some very intriguing data in the last week. We managed to whittle the list down to a few key datasets recently published by some news outlets and journalists.
Without further ado, here are the rules and data for our...
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How to map in Fusion Tables: a basic tutorial
In the last tutorial, I showed how to scrape data off a website. This time I’m going to show how to make a basic heat map in Fusion Tables using GIS data. (Heat maps are very en vogue right now.)
Before I start, I do want to point readers in the direction of NYTimes graphics editor Matthew Ericson’s fantastic blog post that came out a while ago called “When maps shouldn’t...
October 2011
13 posts
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Seven billion oil consumers and counting ...
You’ve probably heard the news: today isn’t just Hallowe’en, it’s “World Population Hits 7 Billion Day,” too. A day of celebration as well as solemn reflection, to be sure: Seven billion is a lot of mouths to feed. You can almost hear Mother Nature’s knees buckling under the weight of so many children.
To mark the day, BuzzData has collected and...
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Congrats to contest winner Martin Madginier!
Congratulations to Toronto-based business analyst Martin Madginier for winning our first local data storytelling contest! As winner, Madginier gets a prestigious and highly coveted $100 ITunes gift certificate ;) Don’t spend it all in one place, Martin (oh, wait …)
Magdinier’s submission won on its merits of accuracy and rigorous methodology, which he explained at length at our meetup...
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Scraperwiki lands in Toronto!
So excited! My cross-Atlantic doppelganger and always-inspiring data journalism advocate Nicola Hughes is presenting U.K.-based ScraperWiki tonight at the new Mozilla office space from 6-6:45pm. (Address: 366 Adelaide St. W, Suite 500) Don’t miss it!
From the meetup description:
Pre-panel Demo & Discussion 6-6:45pm
ScraperWiki with Nicola Hughes
We are delighted to have Nicola...
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Question period with the BD team
Lately BuzzData’s been getting more inquiries from you about what we’re about and where we’re headed in the future. Most of them we get through emails we can respond to directly, but occasionally we do get questions submitted anonymously (that still deserve to be answered!).
As such, I’m taking it upon myself to forward anonymous questions to our staff to get the best...
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How to scrape Toronto data: a basic tutorial
Since my last tutorial on graphing Toronto’s water usage data, I and a few others noticed that water accounts in Toronto don’t dictate the number of people using them (see comment here). As such, this makes visualizing water usage per account (which we did last time) possibly an inaccurate representation of water consumption habits per ward.
A better way to determine comparable water use habits...
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Deadline for contest submissions is tonight!
If you planned on submitting to our first data-storytelling contest, the deadline is midnight EST tonight! To submit, there are specific guidelines (they’re easy but you do have to follow them). The original blog post is here, and here’s a re-post of submission guidelines:
HOW TO SUBMIT YOUR ENTRY:
Submit your project by inviting me (Momoko on BuzzData) and the original publisher of...
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Interview With The Data Addict
One of our earliest and most engaged users is Azad Amir-Ghassemi, a 29-year-old data dynamo based in Washington, D.C.
Amir-Ghassemi is a bit of a data polyglot: he’s finishing up his thesis on metropolitan employment patterns in the States (talk about topical) while simultaneously putting in time at the U.S. Army Core of Engineers research lab. He’s accumulated data on everything from city...
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Can you spin stories out of data? Prove it.
BUZZDATA’S FIRST DATA-STORYTELLING CONTEST IS ON!
It was only a matter of time until I tried something like this. Hopefully this will be the start of something awesome here in Toronto (and perhaps abroad, if others want in): people evaluating and competing to tell the best stories with data.
THE GOAL:
To tell the story behind the data through your own BuzzData project
THE...
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Visualizing Toronto's water usage: a tutorial
Earlier this month I attended and spoke at News:Rewired, a popular digital journalism conference in London, U.K. The journalists there were top-drawer: from Reuters, the BBC, the Guardian, the Telegraph, and others. My talk, on how data curation will be key in driving digital journalism forward, appeared to resonate with quite a few people, which was great.
However, more often than not,...
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How to make a living off data visualization
Last month I presented BuzzData to Hacks/Hackers Ottawa, a gathering of enthusiastic journalists and developers bent on learning the best ways to tell stories digitally. What with BuzzData’s socially-enabled data-publishing features, our product was well-received by the audience. I had a great time.
While there, I met Amanda Shendruk, a 26-year-old journalist-entrepreneur who did a presentation...
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Need help with Stanford's database course?
Just a reminder that Stanford’s six-week intro-to-databases course starts today!
If you’ve enrolled already, you should have gotten an “official launch” email from the instructors with this week’s assignments & materials.
And as added social reinforcement to stick with the class and not get diverted by, well, life —
BuzzData will be hosting online...
Happy (Canadian) Thanksgiving! Eat, drink & be merry!
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A big piece of the data puzzle is now in place
We’ve added some juice to the site and wanted to let you know right away! Without further ado, here are some sweet changes you’ll notice the next time you login to BuzzData:
1. Prettier visualizations & articles
A big part of BuzzData’s vision is making it easier to build the story around your data. As such, we’ve upgraded BuzzData’s Articles and Visualizations...
September 2011
9 posts
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Our next data-journalism workshop is nigh ...
(Part of the Guardian’s popular Prezi presentation of its data-journalism workflow)
… and well, it’s going to be awesome.
In case you missed my most recent email update, here’s the rundown of tomorrow afternoon:
WHERE: The Marketcrashers Hackernest, 231 Wallace Avenue, Toronto, ON
WHEN: Saturday, September 24, 1 pm - 4 pm
WHAT TO BRING: Laptop, power...
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Stanford wants to teach you about data
Wow, data enthusiast’s deal of the day right here: The Stanford School of Engineering is offering a free online course on databases from Oct. 10-Dec. 12. Nicola Hughes at ScraperWiki and Joey Coleman of OpenHamilton have already organizing study groups. Thinking BuzzData should start one too for Toronto peeps. Talk about a find!
Sign up for the course here:
http://db-class.org/
Nearly...
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How sharing data can save lives
By Clay Heaton, data management specialist and co-founder of The Perihelion Group. In 2010, Heaton was dispatched to a field hospital in Fond Parisien, Haiti, where he built a simple Rails-based EMR system so emergency response staff and volunteers could track medical information, triage and treatment.
I’m a public health professional who specializes in data management and the humanitarian...
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Our API is now in beta and ready for testing!
Great news: the first iteration of BuzzData’s API is officially up and running!
While it’s still very young (and its capabilities limited), we do like to release features as fast as humanly possible. It’s just more fun that way.
If you’re a developer who’s been thinking about using BuzzData in creative ways, and possibly collaborating with us in the future, trying out our...
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A crowdsourced-data success story: priceofweed.com
Couldn’t help myself: as soon as marijuana price index site Priceofweed.com showed up on BuzzData, I asked them a few questions of my own on the site came to be.
Whatever your views are on recreational/illicit/medicinal drug policy, I think the most interesting aspect about PoW is that it demonstrates how easy it can be to improve the ground-floor metrics and knowledge base of a given...
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Priceofweed.com publishes on BuzzData
“But … have you ever seen crowdsourced drug map data … on WEED?!”
Last month one of our users, freelance data hacker Rob Medeiros, requested that we get Priceofweed.com on to BuzzData, since he was interested in making some mashups between Global News’s grow-op map data and local prices.
So of course, we did! PoW got back to us really quickly and just released their...
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Data visualization done right
Intercontinental Ballistic Microfinance from Kiva on Vimeo.
Micro-loan non-profit Kiva just recently released an interactive data visualization campaign, that to me, has everything: it tells a story and paints a picture, it’s appropriately colour-coded, it’s evocative; heck, even the musical score they picked adds a touch of humour to the mix. And the title of it, Intercontinental...
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Who is on the chopping block in Toronto?
I woke up this morning to another stream of anxious Facebook comments over newly proposed cuts to Toronto city funding, this time targeting arts grants.
I feel like I hear about people freaking out over service cuts every week or so, but never hear about whether or not cuts go through, or what ultimately happens to the organizations on the chopping block once the story has broken.
I really...
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BuzzData star: James McKinney
Buzzworthy Act: Simply put, BuzzData user James McKinney took some data I had and made it better. A lot better.
Now, revising a dataset doesn’t sound as sexy as say, publishing a data visualization or coding an app. However, at this early stage of building a visible group workflow culture for data, the implications of thoughtfully revising data might actually be more significant over the...
August 2011
8 posts
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Another day, another iteration!
[The following post is a rundown of updates from our most recent newsletter. Enjoy!]
Highlight of the week: BuzzData on Flowing Data
In case you missed it, BuzzData recently caught the eye of Nathan Yau, author of the popular blog Flowing Data and the new hit data-viz book Visualize This! Yau wrote a nice review of our platform, curious about whether BuzzData will forge a new path from...
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BuzzData's Greatest Bits (Vol. 1)
Over the last two weeks, BuzzData users have begun populating the space with data — some datasets are clearly just for fun, but others are worthy of real investigation by data-literate folks.
It’s not difficult to see which datasets on BuzzData are the most intriguing; follower totals tend to reflect what people think will be the most interesting. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean they’re...
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What BuzzData will (and won't) be
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather, teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The BuzzData beta has been public for a few weeks now. Its general reception so far has ranged from evangelistic enthusiasm for its early activity to tentative, thoughtful...
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BuzzData Site Superstars (Vol. 1)
BuzzData isn’t just a data platform, it’s a community. As such, we’ll be regularly highlighting users who show exceptional creativity and initiative on the site. Here’s the first pair from last week (more to come):
David Joerg Alexander Smith
Joerg, founder of The Data Collective, got active on BuzzData pretty much immediately, scrutinizing datasets and asking a host of...
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Data-journalism reunion, anyone?
Well, we said we’d try to do these every month, so we’re back! BuzzData’s putting on another data-journalism workshop next week — can you make it? Be there or well, suck! Just kidding. But you should come.
A lot of things have happened in the last month, most notably: BuzzData is now public (and pretty awesome, if we do say so ourselves). So in addition to having the chance to learn more...
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BuzzData, live and uncensored
BuzzData has now been public for one whole week. Time for an update! First, the community snapshot. What groups stand out on BuzzData so far?
BuzzData’s community is bustling — we’ve got close to 1,000 users registered on the site, many of them developers (obviously) but also a surprising and exciting number of data-loving journalists hailing from Canada, the U.K., the U.S. and Europe.
We’ve...
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BuzzData's now live!
Well, this private party’s been fun, but it’s time to stop being so coy and show the world what we’re about. The BuzzData beta is officially public, open to data lovers (and the data-curious) everywhere!
In the last two weeks, we’ve gotten some incredibly engaged and knowledgeable feedback from our private-beta users. Some of the more memorable, warm fuzzy-inducing...
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Embracing the end of the 'end user'
In step with our imminent public beta launch, BuzzData has recently been written about in VisionCloud, an EU-funded project that focuses on innovations “for the future Internet.” We met VisionCloud contributor and information architect Mirko Lorenz at the Open Knowledge Conference earlier this summer. Lorenz, a speaker at OKCon this year, has high hopes for BuzzData’s impact on...
July 2011
9 posts
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Data-driven journalism, done faster
From the start, we went out of our way to enlist the participation of groups and businesses for the BuzzData beta — after all, BuzzData is all about improving group collaboration around data, right?
Having said that, bringing businesses on board at the beta stage, let alone post-commercial launch, is no small feat for a funky, outside-the-box app like BuzzData. The concept of open data is still...
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Got data? Get on the beta (like, right now!)
BuzzData’s beta is officially underway! We’re bringing a first wave of users on board today and more every few days from here on. We’re so excited (and exhausted)!
But first: We at BuzzData built this platform not just for people who are interested in data, but for people who have it. More and more people collect, use and wrangle data these days. They need a place to show off...