Trend spotting
A series of websites use APIs and scrape pages to spot and analyze trends:
- Fan page analytics – Facebook fan page analytics
- Zoofs – Most talked about YouTube videos on twitter
- Fflick – Most tweeted movie titles
Politics
- Ushahidi – creates a dynamic map of the flood emergency and where help is needed after the Haiti earthquake.
- The worlds best countries – a comparative study of health, educuation, economy, and politics in the countries of the world.
We Feel Fine
Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar has build an engine that constantly scrapes the internet for a list of keywords representing feelings (feeling fine, absurd, abused, etc.) and visually shows them in a visually brilliant way.
Crimespotting
Crimespotting and many other map mashups are made by stamen design company – worth a look.
Real time transit mashups
How big really?
BBC puts things in perspective by overlaying the affected flood area of Pakistan in July (2010) on a European google map.
City heat map by flickr geotag
Some people interpreted the Geotaggers’ World Atlas maps to be maps of tourism. This set is an attempt to figure out if that is really true. Some cities (for example Las Vegas and Venice) do seem to be photographed almost entirely by tourists. Others seem to have many pictures taken in places that tourists don’t visit.
Find your city in the flickr set
Information is beautiful
David McCandless’s site, informationisbeautiful.net, is updated frequently with brilliant and often socio-political illustrations of data.