Google

Ranking TechRaking Tweets

By Matt Stiles | Matt Stiles | Topics: Social Media

Dozens of technologists and journalists today descended on Google’s beautiful Mountain View, Calif., campus for a discussion about technology and journalism. The conference, organized by the Center for Investigative Reporting, led to some prolific tweeting, as one might expect.

I used a simple script to ingest the 1,500-plus tweets with the search API into a sqlite database. This chart, made with Google Docs’ chart tools (when in Rome…), shows the top 25 most prolific tweeters (as of 4:30 p.m. pacific) who used the #techraking and #techrakingcir hash tags.

Congrats, Ian Hill, you top the list (which includes, I think, some spammers):

This is just a quick chart made in a rush. Feel free to download and check out the pipe-delimited data for yourself: #techraking | #techrakingcir. Send me your visualizations or thoughts, and I’ll post ‘em here. See the full list of Twitter user counts here.

Cain Out. Perry Down.

By Matt Stiles | Matt Stiles | Topics: Policy & Politics

Back in October I posted line charts illustrating Herman Cain’s rise in popularity among GOP — and Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s descent after some unsteady debate performances. Yesterday Google released its 2011 “zeitgeist” report, which visualizes worldwide searches during the last year, allowing another comparison of the two men. 

This (unnecessarily 3D?) chart shows the 10 fastest-rising searches in politics news during a critical point in the primary for both candidates. You can see when Cain (in green) began his slide, following allegations of sexual harassment. Perry (in blue) also dropped after the “oops” moment in early November: 

Unemployment in the U.S.

By Matt Stiles | Matt Stiles | Topics: Uncategorized

No president since FDR has been re-elected with the unemployment rate above 7.2 percent, as The New York Times notes this morning:

Seventeen months before the next election, it is increasingly clear that President Obama must defy that trend to keep his job.

This interactive line chart, made with Google’s Public Data Explorer, visualizes the seasonally adjusted national unemployment rate since 1948. The rate peaked in 1982 at 10.8 percent. The lowest rate came in 1953: 2.5%. 

Here’s the view by state (click the play button to see changes over time):

Visualizing Geo Data on a Globe

By Matt Stiles | Matt Stiles | Topics: Uncategorized

From the Google Code blog:

Today we’re sharing a new Chrome Experiment called the WebGL Globe. It’s a simple, open visualization platform for geographic data that runs in WebGL-enabled browsers like Google Chrome. The globe below shows world population, and we’ve created another globe showing Google search traffic.

Very cool. But good luck getting it to render in Internet Explorer.

Get the code.

Searching for Salsa

By Matt Stiles | Matt Stiles | Topics: Uncategorized

Who doesn’t like salsa, right? It’s America’s number-one condiment, at least in the mind of George Costanza. But not all states like it the same, apparently, according to Google, which ranks places by their search terms.

This map shows the volume of Google searches for the word “salsa” in the food and drink category, which filters out searches for, say, “salsa dancing”. South Dakotans and Vermonters searched for the condiment in relative terms more than other states, especially those in the South. (Darker shades represent more search volume): 

Source: Insights for Search | Data: CSV | Shapefile: ZIP