Wow factor - stats made interesting

It's not often you sit at the computer and go wow - but that just happened. I'm going through a list of movers and shakers in the social media world making an OPML to share with everyone and was adding Paul Miller to the list - another UKwebcampbargov attendee who picked up on the fascinating Farmsubsidy.org.

They've scraped and grabbed a lot of data and as well as finding out how much your local farmer (or indeed country) has received from the Common Agricultural Policy.

What they have got to wrangle with is A LOT of data and they have pressed some fascinating tools into service to help visualise this. For example - how do you represent the 2.5 million searches that have been through the site - like this.

It's done using something called Many Eyes from IBM and it's a tool for visualising big lump of data. The really interesting thing is that you can embed the visualisations on your site, create your own from existing datasets, or upload your own data - there are over 12,000 datasets up there. Wow. I've mentioned before about measuring stuff and this kind of open visualisation could be a really useful too, perhaps one to help overlay and map like I was talking about here.