Commute times in your area, mapped
Jun 26, 2012 12:18 am • Permalink 
When you look for a place to live, there are outside factors to consider other than price and square footage. You want to know what the area is like. How's the crime? Are the schools nearby good or bad? Housing search site Trulia provides this information with Trulia Local. Using data from OpenStreetMaps and General Transit Feed Specification feeds, it just got better with their most recent addition that maps commute times.
Commuting sucks. It's stressful, and no amount of Sirius radio can make a traffic jam fun. Because of this, we know that commuting is an important consideration when choosing where to live, whether you're in Los Angeles or Boston. So, launching today is Trulia's first iteration of the Commute Map, a way to visualize driving and public transit times. With this new product, we aim to give Trulia users a better understanding of commute times to work or anywhere important, to help them find the best place to live.
Put in your location, and the heatmap indicates areas you can get to in less than thirty minutes. If you want to see places farther away, you can use the slider to adjust the time, up to an hour away.
I found myself just punching in addresses for fun and emphatically dragging the slider back and forth. The map is responsive, and most importantly informative, especially if you're planning a move.
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Chart Chooser helps you choose charts
Jun 25, 2012 09:19 am • Permalink 
There are a lot of charts to choose from, and if you pick the wrong one you'll end up communicating the wrong message or make it hard for others to read your data. Luckily, Juice Analytics has you covered with an interactive Chart Chooser, based on Andrew Abela's flowchart from a few years ago.
There are toggle buttons on the top that let you filter based on what you're looking for, such as a trend or relationship. For example, if you select comparison, distribution, and composition, you're left with a bar chart. Don't care about distribution? You can also try a stacked bar chart.
There is a second set of buttons that let you choose between Powerpoint or Excel. Once you find the appropriate chart type, you can download the template for the software you selected. Of course, if you're not an Office user, you can always just use it for the choice making.
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Endangered languages project
Jun 25, 2012 12:39 am • Permalink 
Google, in collaboration with Vizzuality, are trying to catalog endangered languages before they are gone forever in the Endangered Languages Project.
Humanity today is facing a massive extinction: languages are disappearing at an unprecedented pace. And when that happens, a unique vision of the world is lost. With every language that dies we lose an enormous cultural heritage; the understanding of how humans relate to the world around us; scientific, medical and botanical knowledge; and most importantly, we lose the expression of communities' humor, love and life. In short, we lose the testimony of centuries of life.
A map on the homepage gets the most attention. Each small dot represents a language, and they are color-coded by endangerment risk. Click on one to get more details about the language or add information yourself to improve the records. Zoom out and the counts aggregate for an overview.
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