Just finished watching a video on Woopra, a service/app that intends to provide real time information on the people visiting a website at the moment of the analysis.
It’s really neat watching people logging on the the website, knowing where they’re from, even getting their Gravatars, all in real-time.
The interface aparently needs a bit of polishing, but they provide some nice visualizations, including a world map of where your visitors are coming from.
One drawback I can see saw far is it’s requirement of a client-side app to be installed on the user’s machine. Maybe if it was written in Flex/AIR it could be run both as a desktop and as a web application using the same code base. Since I haven’t downloaded the software yet, I can’t comment that far.
My website is pending approval, and I plan to get back on it when I give Woopra a test run.
The title is a direct quote from the TED page presenting Dr. Hans Rosling presentation back in 2006, as one of the most accurate possible. This may come as old news to some, but my last post on Dr. Jill Taylor’s TED presentation made me realize I should have written something about this at some point in this blog.
So, if you’re not familiar with the fun and outstandingly engaging speaker that is Dr. Rosling—or his work with GapMinder, for that matter—behold one of the best talks you will ever watch:
This is the good stuff. This is as good as data visualization gets. It may lack a bit in the aesthetic sense of it, but doesn’t really make a difference. Because this is dense, useful, mattering information, presented in ways people never even imagined.
I mean, there are a lot of data visualization projects with beautiful results, working with sometimes interesting data, but it dwells frequently in process or tools experimentation. I’m no critic: I’m a huge admirer; hell, I had been actually working on a few experiments of myself. But this is a whole different ball park.
This is the kind of stuff that molds minds, that feeds leaders with the information they need to make good, evidence-based decisions for their people. It’s the kind of tools that promotes the insight that allows populations to demand from their policy makers choices based on the experiences of other countries. That allows people to get their mind around seemingly unsolvable problems and vote and act their way through it.
You add on top of that the passion with which Dr. Rosling’s narrates the development of countries and world events with the excitement of a sportscaster. This involves you with information with enthusiasm in a surprising way.
It doesn’t end there, since in a brief presentation he manages to explain clearly the differences between means and goals, and how we most frequently mix them up, making choices that are not as productive as we think.
That is as good as it gets.
And, as a bonus, Dr. Rosling’s returning talk on TED2007, with some new insights:
Please don’t miss these. You’ll thank me later.
And if you want to check on how GapMinder is doing, check their website.