This is my first post about Trendrr. It takes a while to get to all the interesting things that the site offers, so this will be brief. Trendrr is a place where you can create and view data sets, then socialize and work with them. It has features of sites like Swivel and Many Eyes, but also harks back to some earlier attempts to periodically track things like Google search result counts and so on (I don’t believe many of them have survived), while also evoking wrapper induction technologies like dapper.
One of the things that really resonated with me was their approach to time series charts. While not the most beautiful, the controls allow you to view the data in overlay or side-by-side mode and relative and absolute. This last feature is something that we implemented in our tools back in Intelliseek, so I’m happy to see it again. The graphs also have slider controls for width and provide an ability to annotate the data at any point. Finally, you can overlay regression lines to see how the data is trending.
All of these bells and whistles may be a little to much for the casual user, but my feeling is that a) the more sites like this that are out there, the more demand there must be for them and b) some of this has to stick and make an impact on our society’s data literacy.
I’d love to be able to import data from Political Streams into Trendrr, Swivel, …
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