I was honored to get to give a talk at PopTech about Data Without Borders as one of their Social Innovation Fellows this year. It was an incredible experience that I can never thank the good people at PopTech enough for. My 5 minutes of fame above!

Drew Conway and I are going to be speaking about Data Without Borders Friday morning at 8:50AM at Strata 2011. This is a super awesome opportunity for us to share this amazing idea with the data world and we’re really in debt to Edd, Alistair, and everyone at O’Reilly for giving us time on their stage. They’ve already done a ton of great stuff for us with their Datashirts campaign, so this is really overly generous of them. If you’re at Strata, come bright and early tomorrow to see the talk live or, for those who couldn’t make it, you can watch all of the keynotes streamed live here.

Wow. I am incredibly honored, humbled, and excited to announce that I’ve been selected as a 2011 PopTech Social Innovation Fellow for Data Without Borders. Ever since I first heard about PopTech I have been hugely inspired by their mission of fostering world-changing ideas and bringing technology to bear on some of the world’s most pressing problems. I am extremely honored (and, frankly, almost embarrassed) to be given the opportunity to mingle among the incredible people there who are finding new and innovative ways of improving the world. I can’t thank PopTech enough for this and am going to spend the next month feeling like a kid trying to sleep the night before Christmas (Why can’t it be October _now_???)

The fellowship program is of course followed by the wonderful PopTech Conference, the focus of which this year is “A World Rebalancing”. If you or anyone you know is up near Camden, Maine October 19th-22nd and likes awesome things, come join us!.

#cantwait

“A table is nearly always better than a dumb pie chart; the only worse design than a pie chart is several of them…Given their low density and failure to order numbers along a visual dimension, pie charts should never be used.” – Edward Tufte, “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information”

We here at Data Without Borders fancy ourselves relatively savvy data visualizers. We have been doing data visualizations for some time, and have worked with many different kinds of data. We believe that a carefully crafted visualization is the most powerful way to convey insight from data. That said, one visual device we would never use is the pie chart. As Tufte eludes to in the above quotation—they suck.

In our eagerness to pull together Data Without Borders, however, we violated our own cardinal rule when designing the DWB logo. As you can see, while the logo is compelling, at its core it is a pie chart. It took us a few weeks to admit it to ourselves, but this error must be corrected. Unfortunately, none of us are designers. Put us in front of gigabytes of data and an R console, and we can make it sing. But, put us in front of Photoshop and Illustrator and we are useless.

We need your help.

Today we are announcing the Data Without Borders Logo Contest. Starting right now, we are accepting logo submissions. Here is some basic information:

Along with being showered with accolades by the DWB team, the winner will win a $100 Amazon Gift Card

Please send entries to datawithoutborders@gmail.com, and please contact us if you have any questions at @DataNoBorders or DWB on Facebook. We’re really looking forward to seeing what you guys come up with and, seriously, no pie charts.

Project Cascade is a project that visualizes the sharing activity of NYT content over social media. It was a project started and manned by Mark Hansen with visuals provided by Jer Thorp. It’s a terribly awesome project that links data from NYT logs with bit.ly shortening data and Twitter data to track the full flow of conversation from the site, to Twitter, and back to the site. The current version runs on a canned set of two weeks of data that was used to prove the worth of the tool, but I’ve been working with the team on creating a realtime version that will let us look at all sorts of interesting current and historical data.

I’d add more, but most of the good stuff has already been written up on the NYT R&D Labs project page. Keep an eye out here for updates.

openpaths.cc was an impromptu project put together by Matt Boggie, Brian House, Jer Thorp, and myself over at the labs in response to Apple’s announcement that it was basically tracking the location of your iPhone / iPad over the past year and syncing it to your harddrive. Most people’s immediate reaction to this was to call for Apple to delete this data *immediately*. But we thought to ourselves, “Wait a second – millions of people have been walking around with location-sensing devices for a year without even knowing it?? We’re sitting on the awesomest and most thorough human mobility dataset ever created!”

We immediately set about making a site to allow people to privately store and preserve that data before Apple inevitably wiped it out. We created a site where people could securely and privately upload their data and visualize where they’d been over the past year, with the option to download their data as JSON or CSV to remix / view / analyze however they saw fit. Heck, it’s your data – if Apple hasn’t, should you at least have it too?

We’re also working on an option for the more philanthropic minded amongst our users to donate their data to research projects that could use this data to make the world a better place. This dataset is of incredible interest to urban planners, mobility researchers, land use experts, and epidemiologists, just to name a few. We envision a situation where researchers would request permission to use data, individually or in aggregate, and allow users to allow permission if they saw fit.

Whether you’re a data Utopian or you just like visualizing where you’ve been, hop over to openpaths.cc and start uploading your iPhone data. It’s your device, it should be your data too.