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.

McDermott offers a number of different treatments of different routes on his Flickr account, which was highlighted today on the design blog NotCot. Map blogger Keir Clarke points to another bike mapping visualization today called Animaps.

From Data, Much is Possible

These are just a few examples of the new kinds of value that can be extracted from data when it can be extracted from the services used to create it and manipulated by other applications. In these cases, there are elements of storytelling, multimedia presentation and emotional communication that are all made possible by working with the data.

The data we create online isn't always as easy to access though as location data is from services like MapMyRide.

One of the people working to change that is Jeremie Miller, inventor of the widely used Instant Messaging protocol XMPP and now co-founder of personal data locker startup Singly. (Here's our in depth write-up of Singly and The Locker Project.)

"When you own your data, anyone can create a new way for you use it, visualize it, experience it and share it," Miller says.

"When someone else owns your data, then new tools can only be developed with the permission of that 3rd party and tied to that 3rd party's system. For those that want to create new experiences, they have to overcome either the permission barriers, or the technological barriers, or the submit-to-a-dictator barriers before doing something great for you with (what should be) your own data. That's a lot of impedance. For every one awesome new experience that can make it past all that and/or find data that is more free/accessible, there are 10, or 100 more, that didn't overcome the barriers."

Thank goodness for freely accessible personal location tracking data; look at the kinds of cool things it makes possible. Perhaps some day all our data, from social networking to health records, will be as accessible to us who should own it to innovate on top of. That would be epic.

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.

The visualization is interactive and using various keyboard shortcuts, you can navigate between different views and event markers. You can zoom into a particular area (with the + key), for example, or filter the edits by language (with the space bar).

There are three types of visualizations available with this new tool: an animation of edits, a bubble map, and a heat map - all highlighting the 400,000 some odd edits that occur in a given day.

The tool reveals some interesting trends, not surprisingly showing different language versions more active depending on the time-zones. It also demonstrates that most edits to the Chinese-language Wikipedia come from outside mainland China.

Zachte has written a blog post explaining how he created the visualization tool using HTML5 and JavaScript.

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."

Thanks to Flowing Data for blogging about it first.

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.

Changing media types. Hello, radio in WWII era books! And look at the tiny little Internet, just starting to get in the game, there in the right hand corner.

Seven deadly sins. Looks like we're growing less fixated and finding other things to write about.

Angels vs. Unicorns vs. Mermaids. Not even close.

Garlic vs. Onion. We are living in changing times, people.

Carrot vs. Celery Celery probably thought it was pulling into the lead for good. Not so!

Major religions of the world. Indexed literature is growing increasingly diverse.

Drugs

Phobias and prejudices. Is this a chart of what the world cares about most?

Nerds, Dorks, Geeks and More

Authors: Huxley vs Camus vs Leary vs McLuhan Honestly, I think this one is the one that surprised me the most. If not carrot vs celery.

Want to see more? There's a whole community of Ngram collection going on over at Ngrams.Tumblr.com.

ReadWriteWeb's COO and spreadsheet man Sean Ammirati said the service still doesn't look as powerful as Excel, of course. "Honestly, though, it's getting closer and those visualizations are cool," he says. "I could also see bringing Excel sheets over for some of them." Check out the demonstration video below.

You can try out the new charts editor via this link: goo.gl/newcharts. Imagine being able to play with these tools on an iPad.

Let us know what you think.

We're not the only entity to think so, apparently. A scrum of investors lined up behind the company, including Kima Ventures, whose co-founder, Xavier Niel, recently bought what is, arguably, France's best-known newspaper, Le Monde.

The investing team is filled out be German group Econa, Jeremie Berrebi and a handful of angels.

The company says it was caught flatfooted by what it called an immediate and sudden uptake in users that it has spent time on stabilizing the back-end. It will now turn to "generic new functionalities" and to supporting new languages.

Photographer Eric Fischer has created a number of interesting data visualizations using geotagged location data on photo sharing service Flickr. His latest project compares the locations of photos that were taken in major cities by people who have posted there for a short time (tourists) vs. those who post there for a long period of time (locals). The results are striking and fun.

This is an amusing example of the kind of insight that becomes possible to derive from a world instrumented with data. Go team social web!

San Francisco

Portland

New York

In the visualization above, yellow markers could be either tourist or local.

What other pivot points can you imagine comparing location and photos with? Duration of proximity by photographer is a pretty neat one.

That's the question startup YouTego attempts to answer with its Web-based app that asks users to spend a few minutes in navel-gazing self-definition to create a snappy page of terms and related images. It's simple, social and actually quite fun once you get the hang of it.

In YouTego, the UI isn't quite as intuitive yet, but the results are pretty slick. Users have the option of telling the app a little bit about themselves. Then they can identify "tegos" (tags for the ego, according to the site) to show what they can do, where they work, where they go/went to school, what they love and more.

For the visual component, the user is asked to select a thumbnail for each tego. These images are found through a lightbox-type feature in the app, and can come from any number of sources, including Google search or a specific Flickr account.

Once tegos are created and elaborated upon through expressions and impressions, the user can be matched to others on YouTego or other users' content, and then can star other users' tegos and add TegoMates or friends.

It would be cool to see the service integrated with Facebook and Twitter, which it doesn't appear to do currently. And the app is very young and has its bugs. For example, it doesn't play well with Chrome at all.

Still, it's gathering a lot of good data about related tags, tags related to images and how people connect over expressions of their own personalities.

Google has just announced it's releasing an API for Fusion Tables. The API integrates with Google Maps, App Engine, Base Data and Visualizations APIs, as well, to allow for motion charts, timelines, graphs and maps with all the data available and running on Google's infrastructure. The API allows users to upload data from any source, from text files to full databases, and see their data merged and compared in cool visualizations. Surprisingly, that's not even the best part.

The Fusion Tables API also allows for queries and downloads. It's built on a subset of SQL. By referencing data values in SQL-like query expressions, developers can find data and download it for use by their app. The application can then do any kind of processing on the data, like computing aggregates or feeding into a visualization gadget.

Visualizations of data can be embedded in blogs and other sites all around the web, and attribution remains constant for all the data that is uploaded to Fusion Tables.

Another cool aspect of Fusion Tables is its real-time collaboration features. As with Google Docs, collaborators can be invited via email. Multiple people can view and comment on the data, and these discussions show users' commments and any changes to the datasets over time.

For an overview of how Fusion Tables works, check out this demo video that explains how data can be mashed up and graphed:

We also found this cool video from Google engineer Alon Halevy and Pacific Institution president Peter Gleick on the principles of interpreting and using data to solve water problems:

Developers can get more information at the API developer's guide page.

We think data itself is exciting and has the potential to tell many previously unheard stories. We wonder what kinds of apps will be developed using Fusion Tables, and we also wonder where the datasets will come from.

What kind of data would you like to see explored and visualized in apps from Fusion Tables developers? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

It's a fun site to use. Basketball, football and NASCAR are supported initially - hopefully baseball and hockey will be next. There's OpenID integration, the image selection is really nice and it's just great. It's still a little rough around the edges but given that the service just launched today - we're impressed. This is the kind of democratized data visualization that any field could benefit from with enough open data and a good user interface.

The Adobe Flash charts that StatPlot produces are even nicer, but they aren't easy to scale down to the size I needed.

The whole StatSheet franchise is an interesting one to watch. See TechCrunch's recent coverage of the company's tussle with Twitter over innovation on that platform.

Bring on the huge data sets and easy charting interfaces! We'd love to see a little of that action over at Data.gov, for example. Heck, let's see these kinds of options put on top of the forthcoming ClearSpring API tracking hundreds of millions of peoples' sharing activities online.

As StatSheet said on its blog today: "There are other services (Swivel, iCharts.net, Many-Eyes) that allow you to upload data and create a variety of visualizations, but these all suffer from the same issue. The average sports fan does not have access to quality sports stats to upload. With StatPlot, you don't need to bring your own data because you can use the expansive StatSheet database!"

It's not just sports fans that could use a hand with data sets. We all could. Thanks for leading the way in truly democratizing data visualization, StatSheet.

The folks at Thinkmap (the makers of Visual Thesaurus) have just launched a tool called VocabGrabber that is absolutely as cool to play with, as it is informative and useful. It takes any text a user chooses (it can process an obscene amount of copy - up to 200,000 characters, or about 100 pages) and parses it for likely vocabulary words, organizing them in several fascinating ways and showing linguistic and contextual links to other terms.

Here's a taste of how VocabGrabber handled the famous "Once more unto the breach" soliloquy from Shakespeare's Henry V, showing all identified vocabulary words, sorted by relevance in a list, with icons denoting the nature of the word and visuals linking it to similar words, all with definitions and uses in the text itself:

Next, just for fun, we threw the entirety of Plato's Symposium into the text entry field and checked out how all the vocabulary words looked in a color-coded tag cloud:

Then, we decided to separate vocabulary about people, social studies, and the arts. We wanted to see linguistic maps of the words as thumbnails, and we wanted the words sorted alphabetically:

Finally, we wanted to see the same results as a list sorted by number of occurrences within the text:

Also, any vocabulary words can be mapped using the Visual Thesaurus, which is available on a limited trial or a rather affordable subscription basis:

Obviously, this is a great tool for ESL learners, for English teachers at certain grade levels, for standardized-test takers, and for students at any level who struggle with comprehension of dense text material. VocabGrabber also seems like a nice way to keep one's offspring from rotting in front of a television.

Additionally, it might be a fun way to spend a few minutes that you, the non-learning adult netizen, would have otherwise donated to the ICanHasCheezburger franchise. Plus, it probably looks a bit more convincingly work-related on your cubicle computer screen than does a wittily captioned photo of a cat with a lime-rind helmet.

Connect to Salesforce.com - More Enterprise Features Coming Soon

Business users will be happy to hear that RoamBi already connects to Salesforce.com, though the company plans to release a full-blown paid version of the service and the RoamBi server, which can be hosted behind a company's firewall, in about three months.

In many ways, the current version of the app is only a preview of the full functionality that RoamBi will give to enterprise customers who will be able to license the service's server.

Part I: Publisher

The iPhone app and the Publisher work hand in hand. The publishing application allows users to upload files or import them from Salesforce.com, decide which view to choose for a specific spreadsheet, modify which tables and columns to display in the new spreadsheet, and then publish the edits to the iPhone.

However, once these files are uploaded and published, we couldn't quite figure out if it was also possible to manage these documents (and unpublish them, for example), from the web app. It looks like this functionality is only available from the phone.

Part II: iPhone App

This isn't really something we expected we would say when we received RoamBi's PR pitch, but the application really makes spreadsheets sexy. While the absence of any editing mode might limit its functionality a bit more than we would have hoped, we have yet to see an app on a mobile device that can do what RoamBi can, and RoamBi's designers clearly know what they are doing.

We could describe the different views that RoamBi uses to visualize data in detail, but the best way to get a good feel for the functionality of the app is through the iPhone simulator on RoamBi's homepage.

The mobile app is extremely intuitive and manages to transform large spreadsheets, which are usually pretty unmanageable on a small screen, and turns them into small mini-apps which don't just look good, but also work just as you expect them to. The design makes good use of the phone's touch screen, and while some of the views look deceptively simple, the intuitive interface allows you to easily drill deeper into the data.

Give it a Try

For now, RoamBi is only available on the iPhone, and when we talked to the RoamBi team last week, they told us that they were watching the mobile market carefully, but that the iPhone currently offered the best experience for the kind of app that RoamBi wanted to develop. Given that about 80% of the RoamBi code was developed for the publisher and the server, though, the company should be able to release apps for more platforms relatively quickly.

Of course, in a perfect world, RoamBi would be part of an iPhone office suite, where users could not just view data, but also edit it in a similarly elegant user interface, but for now, RoamBi turns accessing spreadsheets on the go into a completely new and surprisingly pleasant experience, and we can only assume that its paid offering will find a lot of thankful users once it is released in a few months.

The software, Glasshouse by Green Phosphor, lets you take data from either a spreadsheet or database query and place a 3D representation of it into a virtual world environment where it can then be explored interactively. Users are inserted into the virtual world as an avatar which can then manipulate the visualization of the data by drilling down into it, re-sorting it, or even just spinning it around to see it from all angles.

The benefits to working with data in this way don't really need to be touted too much - many businesses already perform data visualization, often using expensive software and powerful computers to do so. What makes what Green Phosphor does so interesting is not that they've come up with a way to visualize data - it's that they've come up with a way to leverage the platforms of virtual worlds to do so.

How it Works: CICP (Think HTTP for Virtual Worlds)

Some of the company's solutions involve using a proprietary virtual world, "Glasshouse," for data visualization, but for Second Life, Sun's Wonderland, and other virtual world users, they've developed adapters that project graphs from Glasshouse into whichever virtual world you're using. The only requirement is that the virtual world be CICP-enabled.

CICP, or Content Injection and Control Protocol, was developed in-house by Green Phosphor CEO Ben Linquist and released to the public domain. The standard, cross-platform protocol essentially serves as HTTP for virtual worlds where it works as a communication mechanism that the Glasshouse gateway can use to generate temporary artifacts in the worlds. Already it has been added to Sun Wonderland and released under the GPL license there. It has also been implemented in Second Life with the help of a Java servlet and released under a BSD license. The company is currently working to add it to other virtual worlds, too.

Data Viz for Anyone: From Spreadsheets to Biotech

Depending on company size, there are three different levels of service available. First, a spreadsheet world lets you upload Excel spreadsheets that can then be visualized in a web interface. Next, there's a workgroup appliance that delivers data visualization and virtual conferencing needs to small or medium-sized businesses. And finally, enterprise solutions designed especially for virtual markets like bio-technology have also been developed as more customized solutions.

As Linquist explains in this YouTube video, the technology is even advanced enough to produce a virtual laboratory where researchers can perform model-based drug development.

If you have Java installed, you can test their web-based virtual world demo by clicking here (launches Java window). For more information about their solutions, visit GreenPhosphor.com.

We'll admit, we were intrigued as soon as we hit Favo's landing page - it was the screenshot of Favo in action that drew us in. With its bookmark browser that looks nearly identical to iTunes' cover flow visualization, Favo looked like the bookmark management tool we didn't even realize we were craving until it was right in front of us.

Over the past year, we've seen several search engines launch featuring visual browsing, but the closest we've seen to a decent visual bookmark manager was the Windows-only Tidy Favorites, and it only did thumbnail-sized screenshots. While visual browsing may look great, it hasn't proved to be a "Google killer" by any means. For search queries on the net, it seems text is still the way to go. However, when dealing with smaller data sets - like our albums in iTunes, for example - visual browsing can find its niche. It only makes sense to integrate this technology with our favorite bookmarks, too.

According to the Favo homepage, the new service will offer several other appealing features as well. Most notably, Favo claims it will be able to automatically label and tag your favorites based on its intelligent tagging engine. Finally! We're so sick of tagging! A service that does it for you is definitely worth a look.

Favo also promises fast search tools, recommendation and sharing features, groups and channels, synchronization between browsers, and even a curious automation feature they're describing somewhat vaguely as so:

"Your surfing experience does not get interrupted by dialogs that ask you to pause and organize the content you are collecting. Favorites are collected from your browser and from your friends' recommendations."

How well this will all work is anyone's guess, since the service hasn't even launched yet. But based on what Favo intends to do, it's certainly worth signing up for a beta invite.

Still, let's face it, playing what are essentially online computer games where the "fun" is in interacting with random strangers may have been an interesting experiment, but now that the hype has died down, we can see that they only attract a niche crowd. These worlds will not deliver the promise of the 3D web that we had once imagined they would.

Where 3D is Useful: Mapping

When 3D technology is implemented for more practical purposes, though, it can be incredibly useful. Some of the most innovative developments in 3D technology involve advances made in mapping. The newly redesigned Google Maps' Street View is a great example of this. Their recent update lets you drag a figure (the "Pegman") over any street to get a preview of Street View for that location. When the Pegman lands, the whole map turns into a Street View viewer. Google Maps with Street View has also been delivered to our mobile devices where it helps us navigate unknown areas of our world when we're away from our computers.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has also integrated 3D into their mapping platform, only in a different way. They launched their Live Labs project Photosynth in August, which lets you stitch together photos to create detailed 3D environments. Last month, they integrated Photosynth with Live Maps, letting you explore various landmarks and cities in 3D as well as share your own "synthed" photo collections with the other users of Live Maps.

Where 3D is Cool: Browsing

Also this year, we've seen some developments in the use of 3D to deliver better visual browsing experiences. Amazon launched their 3D Winodwshop site which lets you virtually browse through the company's top products.

We've also seen other web applications integrate this 3D visual browsing technology including ManagedQ's semantic Google-based search, Photo Stream's visual newsroom as well as newer search engines like Viewzi and SearchMe. Although none of those have hit the mainstream, they all are interesting experiments.

However, one of our favorite 3D browsing tools is the technology from Cooliris, a browser plugin that lets you transform the web into an immersive 3D experience. With Cooliris, you can surf a "wall of content" from sources like Google, Flickr, Yahoo, SmugMug, and DeviantArt. In October, the company also launched an iPhone application that does the same.

Similar to Cooliris's iPhone app, Microsoft took Seadragon, the technology that supports Photosynth, and released it as an iPhone application callled Seadragon Mobile. With this mobile app, you can browse several image collections including the Library of Congress maps from the TED demo, NASA images, a two-billion by two-billion pixel map of the world, and you can also load custom content via an RSS feed.

3D's Future: Shopping?

As The Guardian reports today, there are many people who think that online shopping is the next frontier for the 3D web. In particular, they make mention of a company called ExitReality, who is developing a 3D plugin that can transform any 2D web site into 3D. Visitors using ExitReality's plugin can change into avatars to wander through web sites and chat with other users. Says ExitReality founder Danny Stefanic, who has been working with virtual reality since 1994, "it's not a replacement for viewing the 2D page - that is still the best way to consume that content - but it gives everyone a 3D space that they can utilize if they want to. And what we have found is that instead of the two- or three-minute session times of 2D websites, when we are in 3D and exploring and chatting to people with similar interests, we spend 20 to 30 minutes there." He notes that sites implementing 3D could offer online sales agents that could chat to visitors or demonstrate products.

In other words, 3D for marketing and sales. Sigh.

Is There Nothing Else?

Last year, we had once wondered if 3D interfaces were useful or just a novelty. We think the jury is still out on that. Besides mapping of course (which extends to new developments in Google Earth, too), the majority of the 3D launches we've seen over the year are fun...even cool...but not incredibly life-changing. In fact, the newest uses of 3D are even more kitschy and even less useful than those that we saw earlier this year. The most recent 3D sites actually backtrack to 3D's beginnings and require you to break out your nerdy red-and-blue glasses to view them. For example, a site called Snowdin.com, is a new holiday Flash production by Colle+McVoy that's entirely in 3D.

For even more mindless fun, we just discovered that you can create your own red-and-blue doodles at the new Neave Anaglyph site.

Sure, we may have rushed out to the car to retrieve our glasses left over from the weekend showing of "Bolt 3D" to view these sites, but we don't imagine that 3D glasses will ever become the new must-have accessory for internet surfing. So where does that leave 3D technology for consumers browsing the web? Fun, games, and virtual worlds? Yes, that seems about right. Although some businesses will find 3D technology useful as we noted before, we did not see this technology become the most ground-breaking innovation of 2008...unless you count the pinching and zooming that took place on our iPhones.

Image credit: 3D images above courtesy of Adverlab; main image: ny3d