ReadWriteWeb

Troy Thibodeaux is the Editor for Newsroom Innovation at the Associated Press and has written a terrific post on resources for data journalists. Now, you probably aren't a journalist, but you should pay attention anyway, since there are plenty of things you can do to manipulate data in interesting ways for your management and others who are far less technical than yourself. Take a look at that piece, and connect that with what Jason Hiner at TechRepublic wrote last month and you will see a potential job opportunity.

Above, Irish designer John McDermott displays GPS data exported from the bicycling community MapMyRide in a very different way. The change of perspective confers a new feeling to the data. This wasn't just a long bike ride, this was an epic trek that deserves to be commemorated.

McDermott, who heads design at Irish interactive agency AB Brown, has removed all other map data to focus on the route itself and puts the starting and ending point in the distant background to help communicate the great distance traveled. In the bottom corner are details like the date, duration, distance, speed and a graphic representation of the weather during the ride. It's a great example of how a strong design can evoke new communicative value from the data we produce though our everyday activities.

Wikipedia is one of the most popular and highly-trafficked websites in the world, with over 3.6 million content pages. While much of the discussion around Wikipedia involves those using the site for research, it's always worth noting - and praising - the tens of thousands of volunteers who actively contribute and edit the content. In fact, according to Wikipedia, there have been some 463 million edits to the site - roughly 19 edits per page.

Wikimedia's data analyst Erik Zachte has just unveiled a new visualization that shows exactly where in the world these edits are occurring on any given day for the various language editions of Wikipedia.

Continuing our focus on business apps for the iPad, today we look at tools for visualizing data and information. The iPad's interface begs to be used for manipulating visual information, and it certainly delivers. And if you're used to creating charts and diagrams at your desk with Microsoft Excel or Visio, these five apps will deliver comparable tools that you can use from anywhere.

Above: WiFi signal spills gently into the street from an old Oslo apartment building built in the 1890's. Video below.

Wireless communication channels are all around us all the time, but their variable strengths in different places create a textured, invisible part of the urban landscape. A team of Norwegian researchers, arguing that WiFi is "a fundamental part of the construction of networked cities," created the beautiful video below visualizing the strength of WiFi signals around their neighborhood in Oslo. They used a four meter pole that measured signal strength and lit up to a great or lesser degree. Then they took time delayed photos of themselves walking through the snowy streets.

"The strength, consistency and reach of the network says something about the built environment where it is set up, as well as reflecting the size and status of the host," writes the team in Immaterials: Light painting WiFi "Small, domestic networks in old apartment buildings flow into the streets in different ways than the networks of large institutions. Dense residential areas have more, but shorter range networks than parks and campuses."

What topics are the big three software giants focused on? Their press releases show what areas of their business they want the media to cover, so I thought analyzing them in bulk might reveal some of their priorities.

I started off by downloading every press release that Apple, Google and Microsoft have released in 2011, and then built word frequency clouds based on the text. My data-mining didn't uncover any secret messages hidden in the releases, but the visualizations do give a flavor of what's on their minds.

There's a lot of data available online - about companies, about entrepreneurs, about investors. An excellent source is CrunchBase, a free and editable directory. Crunchbase has a wealth of information, but according to Sri Harsha, that information is under-utilized. While there's a page for a company or organization, there isn't a way, in Harsha's words to see "the big picture."

In some ways, the Q&A site Quora has become so popular among technology folks for that very reason. It helps provide people with more information and answers about angel investment. But Harsha has created another tool - Fundastic.info, using the data already available through the CrunchBase API to help visualize investment information.

Word of mouth is an incredibly powerful marketing tool, but how do you work out which customers are most important in spreading your message? Services like PeerIndex or Klout help you find experts and influencers in particular communities, but can't measure what people have actually done for your business. The new Vipli.st service from Awe.sm aims to fill this gap by uncovering the fans who drive the most sharing.

Launched at the Strata Startup Showcase last week, the site visualizes how Plancast events are shared across social networks like Twitter and Facebook. It draws a tree showing the first person to create a plan, with links below to everyone who added themselves as attendees after clicking on that link, downwards through the entire history of the conversation around the event. Here's what it looks like for a SXSW Lean Startup plan:

The situation in Egypt has colored much of our coverage today, so it's only fitting that we send you into the weekend with some relevant tutorials: an introduction to Ushahidi for developers, tips for optimizing CouchDB and how to create a Tor relay.

Google Labs launched a great new tool yesterday that graphs the frequency of occurrence of any search terms from across 500 billion words from 5.2 million books, over the last 200 years, in Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish.

Called the Books Ngram Viewer, the tool offers a fascinating look at the way that language, literature and culture have changed throughout recent history. I've been typing in all kinds of fun searches and have included screenshots of 10 of my favorites below. What do all these changes mean? It's probably fodder for endless after dinner conversation and drinking games. Some of them are surprising and some are not at all. We would love it if you would share your thoughts and links to your favorite Ngram search results with other ReadWriteWeb readers in comments below. Thanks, Google, for providing this great example of the beauty made possible through indexing large sets of data.