Odd Places to Find Valuable Data

It’s amazing what you can do with data when you start collecting it. Start off collecting data for one reason and you may find yourself using it for any number of reasons in the future. There are many examples of this to be found on the Internet.

As I’ve discussed previously (What Makes Google so Special), Google is a massive data collection machine. They grab so much data that it is easy to go back later and slice it to look at it in different ways. One valuable service they Read the rest of this entry »

No Comments » | Posted by Jim Lewis |

Don’t Delude Yourself With Your Own Data

Last week, I wrote about valuing the context of the data you are viewing at least as much, if not more than the content (click here to read that post). This is important when you are analyzing the data that other people have put to you and in revealing agendas they may have in the data.

But what about looking at your own data? What is it telling you and how do you know you are getting the right information out of it? Read the rest of this entry »

1 Comment » | Posted by Jim Lewis |

Context over Content

Over at FlowingData.com (an excellent site) I was reading a great post about how British Petroleum is trying to mislead us with graphs in their efforts to curb the oil spill in the Gulf. This really got me thinking about something that we all know but often ignore. A creative person can really make data say anything they want. You can take the exact same numbers and present them in different ways to elicit different responses.

Read the rest of this entry »

2 Comments » | Posted by brightmetrics |