Aussie Geek Podcast

Hey there fellow geeks. The name is Jeff and I’m here primarily to showcase cool data visualizations or infographics that I come across while traversing the web. The first data visualization site I’d like to showcase is called ShowWorld. ShowWorld takes an interesting approach at presenting data by taking a map of the world and letting the size of each country represent the data set for a particular subject.

The top menu lists People, Planet, Business, Politics, Living, and Your Maps. Moving the mouse cursor over any of these parent menu items will open a dropdown box with particular items that have been added into the system. For example, if you were to select PLANET - ANIMAL RESOURCES - PIGS, you should see an animation of the countries changing their size based on the amount of pigs the country has. In this example, China takes the number 1 spot with 501.5 million pigs or, 50.7% of the world’s pig population. That is a lot of bacon!

ShowWorld also has an area for YourMaps which are data sets that have been suggested and submitted by users that are then approved by the ShowWorld staff. If you have an excel file containing a dataset, send it in to ShowWorld with a summary of 60 words. If the entry is selected, it will be published under the YourMaps heading.

Just playing around with the site, I was easily able to see which countries were number 1 or in last place for a particular data set. The animation is powered by Flash so it should be available to play around with for the majority of browsers. Give it a spin and let me know what you learn.