The UK Guardian, a trailblazer in the quest for newspaper survival in a digital era, has an Advent calendar of its best datablog entries for 2009: Hat tip: Cheryl Cook....

How small is small? The University of Utah has a guide: [Click to open the interactive graphic, then use the slider below the image.]...

Today's New York Times uses Flash animation to show how the financial crisis took the market capitalization of America's banking titans from this (On October 7, 2007): To this (on March 1, 2009): And then back to this (last Friday): Note that the animated version, which you really should visit, uses color to show the relative shrinkage and growth of each bank. Gray is the baseline; green is growth; reddish-brown (who chose these colors?) is shrinkage. Rollover text provides detail on each of the included banks. ...

Stephen Taylor, a Conservative blogger who organized a series of rallies to protest last fall's proposed coalition government, has created an extraordinary mashup of poll-by-poll results from the 2008 federal election and Google Earth. The high definition (HD) video may take a few moments to load completely. Elections Canada provides the data that drives this extraordinary tool, but not in a format that Google Earth or Google Maps can read or import. Taylor crashed his computer several times coming up with a program to translate the data into a format Google could use. Taylor's creation will shade each federal poll result according...

One of the great things about running a blog is that when you write about something interesting that you know little about, readers rush in with a wealth of further information. Contrarian friend Andrew Weissman directed us to an extraordinary TED talk by Hans Rosling illustrating the phenomenal potential of the digital graphs we touched on this morning. Rosling is a professor of international medicine at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet (the organization that hands out the Nobel Prize for Medicine). He discovered Konzo, a previously unknown paralytic disease associated with hunger in Africa. He also co-founded the Gapminder Foundation, which developed the...

One of the neat developments of the digital era is the rapid advance of what geeks call the visual presentation of numerical information. Just as word processors revolutionized the mechanics of writing, Photoshop revolutionized image manipulation, and Google Earth revolutionized mapping, new digital tools are giving everyday users the power to produce amazingly useful and instructive interactive graphs. Two online newspapers produced beautiful examples this week: USA Today produced this interactive approval tracker comparing the approval rating for all US presidents since Harry Truman. The crimped screen shot reproduced here doesn't even hint at the power of this tool, so...