Tasty Data Goodies

Join the Swivel Data Team!

When you went to see The Dark Knight (if you haven't, stop reading this, and go... now), did you find yourself wondering how the film's buzz could affect the numbers at the box office? When you heard Barack Obama was going to give a speech in Berlin, were you itching to analyze the word count of the transcript? When a crime takes place at the local college campus, do you feel the urge to calculate the crime per capita in college towns across the nation? Or, when you buy milk at the grocery store, does the prevalence of osteoporosis flit across the back of your mind?

If you found yourself nodding in response to any of these questions, you should join the Swivel Data Team! Our data correspondents find compelling data, upload it to Swivel, and share their insights through featured graphs on the home page. For more information, check out the Swivel Data Team, or you can .

Building Swivel Private Edition: We want to hear from you

When we launched Swivel Preview last December, we designed it for public data. We also promised to follow up with the Private Edition that would let businesses work on their data securely, while comparing private data with public data. In the past several months, much of what we worked on for the Private Edition was not just about privacy and access control to data, but about helping people work together — with data. Data wants to be social, no matter the size of the group: a huge crowd, or just a couple people working together. We now have an early version of Private Edition available and are actively gathering feedback from people, and we would like to hear from you. Just drop us a line and let us know how you work with data and how you think Swivel Private Edition might help you.

Introducing myself...

Hi!  I'm Jesse Robbins, and I recently joined as an Adviser helping Swivel get bigger and more reliable.  Like Sara, my background is a mix of Technology and real-world Emergency Management, and my focus is combining those skills to improve people's lives.

Previously I worked at Amazon.com from 2001-2006 where I was responsible for IT Operations and Availability (my business card read "Master of Disaster").  I'm also a certified Firefighter-1 and Emergency Medical Technician, and have accumulated a number of Hazardous Materials and Technical Rescue certifications.

When I'm not at Swivel I organize BarCampBank & DisasterCamp events, wrangle speakers @ Ignite, and blog for O'Reilly Radar.

Here's a picture from our trip to the OECD World Forum in Istanbul:

Swivel is Moving

Our current data center has served us well since we launched our preview back in December. Now it's time for us to move to a place with a bit more breathing room. And don't worry, Swivel isn't going anywhere: through the magic of technology you'll still find us at http://swivel.com. Swivel will be down for a couple hours while we move things behind the curtains. Come back later and swivel away!

Site update: Charles Darwin

We are about to deploy the work from last week. Swivel will be offline for a short time, less than an hour. Most of the updates are bug fixes.

Why Darwin? We plan our work in weekly increments called sprints. Every Monday, we pick a name for the sprint. We go to Wikipedia and punch in the date of the following Monday, the day the sprint ends, and find interesting events or birthdays. This time it was Charles Darwin's birthday: February 12 1809.

Maintenance

In a short while we'll be taking Swivel offline for maintenance, which should take around two hours. A couple things you'll notice:

• 'Save as new' button in Graph Edit: if you edit a graph you created, you can save your changes to the original graph, or save the changed graph as a new graph. If you're not the graph's owner, you'll only see 'Save as new', and your changes will be saved in a new graph.
• 'Save' and 'Cancel' buttons in Graph Compare: after you create a comparison, you'll need to save it if you want to keep it.

See you in the morning!

UPDATE: Swivel is back up. The deploy took just under an hour.

Categories and Metrics

When we updated Swivel earlier this week, we snuck in a couple things that help us illustrate the fundamental principles of how Swivel looks at data. On the surface of it, we slapped some icons on columns of data to distinguish between Categories, Metrics, and Dates & Times.

Category

  Metric

Date & Time

If you can't wait to rush back to Swivel:

• Columns with text are Categories
• Columns with numbers are Metrics
• Date & Time columns are, well, the inimitable Date and Time

What do we mean by this?  Metrics are things people measure, like the price of oil.  If someone measures the price everyday, for example, then they would have two columns in Swivel one for the oil price, the metric, and a second for the date.  With a metric and a date column Swivel can plot a line graph of the data over time.

Another example: if Diplomats are ignoring their parking tickets, someone could measure the number of tickets (a metric) and also record the diplomat's country (a category). With a category and a metric Swivel will plot a pie graph or a horizontal bar graph.

More details:

- Click on a metric column to see its values plotted by time or by category.

- Click on a category column to see what category values (put simply, text labels) are in there, and see all other metrics on the data set plotted by these values.

- Here's the cool thing: click on any value to filter all the data just for that value. Every time you click, Swivel will spring a bunch of graphs for you. See trends filtered on a specific category value (income by gender just for women). See bar graphs with the current value highlighted. Go nuts with your data. Pivot tables, eat your heart out.

- Now you can get totally lost in your data. Throw just a couple columns at Swivel and it creates a bustling downtown of data streets and avenues, and you can cruise through all of simply by clicking around on hyperlinks. The web is great because of simple hyperlinks, and we're not about to mess with that.

- Remember, every time you turn a corner and click into your data, graphs are waiting for you. If you know what you want, proceed as if following street directions: "I want to see test scores by subject just for math," just follow the columns. If you don't know what you want, just wander around. Once a graph catches your attention, grab it, play with it by clicking on the Edit icon, and click on Apples/Oranges to compare to your heart's content.

I've got a few more things to say about metrics and categories, and how you can play games with them by turning one into the other, but I'll save that for later.

Photo credit (although I almost fell for this one)