Creatalytics by Matthew Burgess » TED Talks

Spencer Greenberg TEDx – Improve Your Life With Probability

Matthew Burgess — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 17:26:41 +0000

From TEDx Black Rock City, Burning Man. This lines up with how I’ve approached things for years. Rather than think of things in a dichotomous view (is good vs is bad, will happen vs won’t happen), I like to think of things in terms of the probability.

Hans Rosling – TED 2007 – New Insights on Poverty

Matthew Burgess — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 20:24:41 +0000

I’ve written about Hans Rosling’s awesome 2006 TED conference presentation on income distribution and birth rates in the non-industrialized world. He used a tool for data visualization that was new at the time, and has since been integrated into many toolsets, including Google Analytics.

At TED 2007, he stepped back up to show how his work had progressed. Who’s imagine that statistical analysis could be so entertaining? But if you’re reading this blog, I think we’ve already established that for you, like me, this our kind of geeky fun.

Google’s Visualization API via Hans Rosling at TED

Matthew Burgess — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 04:59:35 +0000

(Summary for the short attention span types: a dry intro, then a video that you have to see.)

In 2006, Hans Rosling gave a presentation at TED, the context of which was income distribution, health, and tech adoption in the third world. But mostly, the presentation became known for the method of presenting the data more than the data itself.

He had wanted a way to visualize data that went beyond the X and Y axis, a way that could show many dimensions, including time, in a visually compelling, animated fashion.

In short, a way to clearly communicate the nuance that is often buried deep in complex data, underneath the convenient summarizations that can cause us to miss more granular opportunities.

From this, he worked to create gapminder.org which in turn created the software he needed. And it’s this software, called Trendalyzer, that is demo’d in his presentation at TED.

About a year later, Trendalyzer was bought by Google, and is now part of the Google Visualization API.

Here is the awesome presentation at TED. If you’re a data geek like me, this is well worth the 20 minutes. Perhaps the most entertaining presentation of 3rd world life expectancy data ever.

I’m eager to dive into this API and use the tool to create motion charts that will help me understand complex PPC campaign performance and site conversion data.

If you’ve used this tool, I would love to hear about your experiences with it.

(And here is Hans Rosling’s Bio on the TED website.)

* Update: As I saw demo’d recently at a Google Analytics product manager presentation at a recent Web Analytics Demystified’s Web Analytics Wednesday, Google has added this to Google Analytics. Looks like a very nice integration. For a nice synopsis, Micah Fisher-Kirshner, Search Strategist and analytics guru at Red Bricks Media writes about motion charts in Google Analytics.