Ben Brown, Internet Rockstar Feverish Velocity

NYTIMES DATA VIZ API “IN OBAMA’s POCKET”

The New York Times has been busy lately releasing data sets and APIs so that developers can tap into the wealth of information they’ve collected. Their rhetoric behind all of this is very appealing to me - they hope that by releasing the data, they’ll create new opportunities for discovering stories hidden within. So far, they haven’t released anything super exciting: you can query the tags they’ve used within their site or sort through campaign finance data they’ve collected. They’ve also got plans to release their movie reviews, which we’ll definitely be taking advantage of.

Today, they announced The New York Times Data Visualization Lab, which is a fancy way of saying they’ve released a bunch of customizable, embeddable “Charticles.” Right now, they’ve got 10 mostly politically-themed datasets available to visualize in a number of ways. They may allow you to upload your own data at some point, but what I’d really be excited to do is cross-reference different datasets. With today’s release, it seems that all the interesting visualizations have already been created by, not surprisingly, The New York Times. But the potential is huge, I think, for citizen journalists and geeks like me to discover interesting things about the world around us.

Just for kicks, here’s a word tree of Joe Biden talking about John McCain based on Biden’s DNC speech - it reminds me of all the fun word toys I used to host on this site. Maybe I’ll try to dig those out of my backups. Click here if the charticle doesn’t appear below… seems not to be working just yet!

What can we learn from this? Joe Biden is comfortable disagreeing with his friends.

And here’s an interesting comparison. I noticed while watching the debates and the convention speeches that McCain uses the word “FIGHT” a lot. It makes me think that he is looking to get into a fight. But what does he want to fight? According to his RNC speech:

WOW! That is a lot of fighting! Fighting for justice and the future and ideals and families! He is going to fight, he will fight, he’s not afraid of a fight, and nothing good comes without a fight. He doesn’t mind a good fight, that’s for sure.

Wonder what Obama wants to fight? Al Qaida and the Taliban:

Bring on Obama and his War On The War on Things!