The non-profit organization called Sunlight Foundation, whose mission is to use the Internet to make information about the U.S. government more accessible,  just released a visualization of campaign contributions from 1990-2008, broken down by industry sectors and party lines. From this app, profiled on Programmable Web, you can see how the finance, insurance, and real estate industries spend more than others. The visualization is interactive - just push the play button after configuring the settings. It was built using Google Motion Chart and data from OpenSecrets.

2) Visualizing Earmarks

Earmarks are a hot topic in the current U.S. Presidential election. You can visit  the web site earmarkwatch.org to investigate those spending measures inserted by members of Congress into bills that direct taxpayer dollars to their pet projects. But an even easier way to track which states are the worst for using earmarks, this visualization over on ManyEyes is useful. Wow, look at Alaska!

3) Visualizing Election Polls

University of Utah computer scientists have written software they hope will eventually allow anyone to interactively and visually analyze election results, political opinion polls or other surveys. The software displays data in the form of "radial" charts that are doughnut-shaped and include features of traditional pie charts and bar graphs. The charts are interactive and animated, too. You can watch a video demonstration over here, but unfortunately, the poll-analysis software isn't quite ready for prime time. What a tease!

4) Electoral College Prediction Tracker

This interactive visualization widget provides an overview of the predicted outcome of the U.S. presidential election. The rows depict the results from different news agencies (The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, etc.) and the columns represent the different U.S. states. The states width is based on the number of electoral votes they have available. Political bloggers will really like this one, too - it's embeddable!

5) The 2008 Presidential Election In The Blogosphere

This next visualization, perspctv.com, is an informational dashboard that summarizes and graphs the Internet activity relating to the 2008 presidential elections. The charts compare the similarities as well as the differences between the mainstream media and user-generated content, such as that found on political blogs. Currently, the graphs include CNN polls, new mentions, blogosphere mentions, Twitter mentions, a U.S. electoral map, and Google Trends-based timelines. (via information aesthetics)

Once Trendrr is tracking your data, it can then be mashed up into comparison graph. Data can be left absolute or scaled relatively, and the site supports line, area, bar, and scatter graphs. These charts can then be embedded, linked to, or exported via excel, xml, or json. Trendrr can also export data via its new simple graph syndication API.

For example, below is a chart I whipped up comparing the Amazon Sales Rank of the Rick Astley "Never Gonna Give You Up" LP and the YouTube plays of the "rick roll" video. As much as I wish that meme would go away, it does look like it might be helping the man sell a few records.

My main gripe with Trendrr is that it doesn't always have historical access to data. That makes sense for some data sets -- it can't possibly have historical data for YouTube plays unless it was already tracking the video, and it can't possibly track every video on YouTube (at least, not without some serious resources). It does have historical data for some sources where it is available -- such as Google News mentions, but it is inexplicably missing historical data for others where it should be available -- such as stock quotes. As a result, for some data sets, tracking data won't show up for about 24 hours. My plan to offer a graph of Yahoo!'s stock price against Google News mentions was foiled because of the lack of historical data (3 days doesn't make a very compelling graph).

Conclusion

All in all, Trendrr is potentially a very useful site. It makes the task of visually comparing large data sets a breeze, and can handle the tracking of changing web data for you. The team also seems very well put together and dedicated to building out the Trendrr service -- since I came across it last week they added four new data sources and a syndication API (the schema for which was released under a creative commons license, by the way).

Trendrr also gets some serious humor points for their choice of default avatar. I once read that Flickr made their default avatar so bland and dull on purpose in an attempt to get people to change it to something more personal. Trendrr's default is... this guy:

If ol' Dick doesn't get you to immediately change your avatar, I don't know what will!