Brief

For our new Blog over at datavisualization.ch we’ve planned a comprehensive news section to stay up to date with the latest examples of the bespoken field. I wasn’t always a fan of the reblog behavior but I begin to understand the value of reblogging interesting stories for both the blogger as well as the reblogger. Call it “share of content” or simply “spreading” – it helps gain traffic to a site (everyone loves traffic, don’t we?) and it also helps push the original story up a notch in terms of linkage and exposure. So I thought about a clever system of getting quickly to the newest stories without giving up my 9to5. Getting through my favourite 30 datavis blogs I wasn’t really satisfied with the flow of content coming in each day. Don’t get me wrong: the quality is superb and I’ll never give up on reading them by personal interest but to find those newest gems for this purpose I need to dig deeper.

The requirements

Back when I was a student at IAD I created a dashboard for me and my commilitones to stay up to date with everything thats happening at our university as well as in the field of interaction design. I used Netvibes and was able to build a useful ressource for us using different feeds and webscraping technics as information ressources. This time again Netvibes is the platform but the sources needed to be much more sophisticated. Using the tools that are out there makes it quiet easy to aggregate and conglomerate feeds together. But a vast amount of data isn’t worth much when you can’t consume it with a moderate effort. Rewireing, filtering and prioritizing seems to be the keys.

The sources

For our daily visual inspiration I used a combination of the most recent uploaded Flickr pictures combined with a Yahoo Pipe that combines flickr searches on different tags that relate to data visualization. A YouTube – GoogleVideo – Vimeo – Viddler Mash-up delivers us with some animated niceness and Slideshare serves our educational needs. The cutting edge news part is provided by three social spider heavyweights. We use SocialMention to search mainly Google’s Blogsearch, Upcoming, Eventful, Digg, YouTube and Flickr. Spy.appspot.com aggregates Twitter, FriendFeed, Backtype and Yahoo BOSS for microposts about the searched topic. Last but not least we use a modified version of the Social Media Firehose by Kingsley2 on Yahhoo Pipes to spider even more platforms. To avoid duplicates and give the more important posts some extra exposure we run these feeds through PostRank.

The dashboard

All these feed come together on our Netvibes dashboard and this makes it possible for us to review the huge amount of data coming in on an hourly basis. We choose the most interesting posts to share with the community in our news section at datavisualization.ch. If I had to choose one feed to recommend to you I’d be the CuttingEdge RSS – it’s a neat condensed flow of information about whats happening right now in the field of data visualization.

Footnote

As we love flows of data that are freely available so we thought it’d be a shame to keep these valuable resource for ourself. Thus the whole stream of data is also collected in our database with the superb lifestream plugin for wordpress and as a result it’s presented on our dashboard page. So feel free to check by and take a glipse in the datavis universe.