There are very few things that make me sad, but one is watching the perpetual tailspin of an entrepreneurial group or individual.
If you are part of an entrepreneurial endeavor, you probably owe it to yourself to read this.
There are some important entrepreneur tips to absorb.
When I left the typical corporate grind working for a Fortune 50, one of my goals was to help others succeed, to push further, go farther, and find something bigger for themselves.
There is so much data that it is an incredible task to actually comprehend it.
Like looking at a TV screen full of static…
trying to rationalize if one pixel means something.
In order to make the data actionable we need to really focus on tools to clarify what we are looking at.
We need to think about
the process of tuning into a specific channel
of segmenting data
of communicating the significance of that data
of doing SOMETHING with the data
To that end I’ve collected another list of tools that specifically help with visualizing different types of information.
Keep in mind that some of these tools just need ‘some play time’ where you trial and test different types of data until they begin to make sense to you, your audience, and your business.
You should always keep in mind
Some people are intellectual and other people are creative.
Some people visualize numbers and some people visualize pictures.
Some people read the line, others read in-between the line.
Some people think as individuals, others think as groups.
Brilliancy and genius is simple and straight-forward
If you have a visualization tool we’d love to check it out.
Please offer your recommendations in the discussion area below!
…..
“Easy to Use” Visualization Tools
Taggalaxy.de
Tag Galaxy is a very straight-forward visualization tool for clustering images based on tags and for exploring them in a simple user interface. The developer has setup some popular tags to begin exploring on the homepage, but you can easily search for your name, business, or popular industry hashtag.
Visual.ly
Is an application that allows you to create and explore visualization based on different types of social media data. They also have a fairly extensive gallery of infographics covering a wide range of topics.
TouchGraph
Is both a free and paid tool, giving options to explore Google Search graphs, URL clusters, and Facebook graphs. It has many additional options for color coding networks and finding connective points between clusters.
Social Media Oriented Tools
Google+ Ripples This is a hidden gem, often overlooked by many. It allows you to see the way any URL has been shared by users on Google+, clustering networks around influencers on a topic and providing a timeline feature that allows you to watch how a URL spread through-out a network.
Revisit (image below)
This is a great Twitter visualization that allows you to see clustering and communication signals over the course of a specific timeframe. For social media managers and data analyst it is a good example to how some topics make a ‘big splash’ and other topics have staying power.
Tweet Spectrum
Great way to find words around related tweets and similar topics
Charting Oriented Tools
Google Fusion Tables
Useful tool that has csv and Excel options, along with a wide variety of hidden tricks (a few searches on Google)We all know about the powerhouse that is Google.
Many Eyes
A useful data visualization tool by IBM, offering a variety of sample data sets to create visualizations to explore.
Web Content Based Tools
RSSvoyage.com
Provides a flowing based visualization of RSS feeds. Articles ‘fly by’ as the RSS feed updates.
WikiMindMap
This is actually a very useful tool for understanding Wikipedia and what topics people feel are important enough to detail, segment, and annotate. Great for social research.
Dipity
Create timelines… about whatever topic you like. Import RSS, pin markers, add hyperlink to photos,video, etc
HTML Graph
This is more artistic than useful; it simply breaks out a color coded visualization of a site based on common HTML components.
If you want to see how the world news is currently trending, Newsmap gives you a color coded segmentation of trending topics across major news portals. You can select filters according to country, as well as limit results to what is happening in the last ten minutes.
Personal Visualization Tools
Visualize.me
Connects with your Linkedin account and creates a personalized infographic of your professional life. Has multiple control options for fonts, colors, and background.
InMaps– LinkedIn (see previous post, Influence Analysis with Linkedin InMaps)
Provides a way of examining your Linkedin network and the relationships that interconnect everyone, with color coding features to highlight certain key networks so that you can visually see ‘how’ people are connected (through employers, industry groups, and personal networks.)
Barry Hurd About.Me Page
Biogrify
In closed beta, a different way to capture yourself on line in creative way.
Vizify TweetSheet
Vizify’s TweetSheet showcases revealing details from your tweetstream, including: top followers, geographic impact, most-retweeted posts, and more.
Re.vu
This takes your Linkedin data and creates a visual resume from it.
Kinzaa
If you want timelines and infographics on your resume, this provides some simple tools for making one.
About.Me
If the above tools don’t work, About.Me lets you create a fast landing page for yourself.
Word Based Tools
Tagxedo
A straight-forward ‘word cloud’ visualization tool. It can form word clouds from blogs, tweets, tags, rss feeds, and text import. Allows you to control the shape of the word cloud (import a company logo…) or have font/color changes.
Wordle
Another fast and friendly word cloud tool that allows you to make clouds from almost any text source.
Tag Crowd
If Tagxedo or Wordle don’t work for you, Tag Crowd is a third option that has slightly different controls.
Map Based Visualization Tools
All of these tools do one thing… visual data on a map.
Copernic http://www.copernic.com/en/products/agent/personal.html
Copernix is a piece of software that accesses multiple search engines using one interface. It aggregates the information, provides multiple filter options, saves search records, highlights keywords, and allows import/export of the results.
Yahoo Pipes http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ This isn’t really a data source, but a web based tool that allows you to aggregate, mash-up, and syndicate other sources of data. It is incredibly useful as a tool to build ‘minimum viable models’ for web research (but does have a learning curve.)
GNIP http://gnip.com
Gnip provides data from dozens of top social sites ranging from Facebook and Twitter to Youtube and Vimeo. By using a single API it allows you to access thousands of data fields that can be extracted for all sorts of competitive intelligence on businesses, community audiences, and specific people.
DataSift http://datasift.com
Is another social media data provider. They have a tremendous amount of information available (some overlap with Gnip, some is unique.) It is one of the few social media data providers that can provide full access to the Twitter firehose.
Spinn3r http://spinn3r.com
Yet another social media data company, but with focus on real-time indexing of the blogosphere or content that you specifically want. Very useful for processing large amounts of social content found on niche community sites that don’t make it onto Gnip or Datasift’s lists.
It features a great selection of 40+ scripts and files that you can use to create some great visualizations. These are mostly javascript functions, so you’ll have to know a bit of coding to implement.
Axiis
Axiis is an open source set of visualization tools that allows advanced charting and visualization on a variety of different data sets. They have a few colorful examples, such as a breakdown of browser usage month-by-month since 2002. This is a useful data-driven toolset, allowing complex charting visualization with mouse over effects for embedding results on the web.
Gephi
Like Photoshop for data. Graph visualization and manipulation software. Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs.
Runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Gephi is open-source and free.
Hopefully these tools give you some remarkable new ways to create insight to your data.
If you can recommend a tool, please let us know in the comments below.
Thanks for reading
https://barryhurd.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/twitter-visualization.jpg413726Barryhttp://barryhurd.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/barry-hurd-cyber-security-smac.pngBarry2012-08-17 17:13:382012-08-17 17:13:3840+ Visualization Tools for dashboards and social business
Congratulations, you’ve just found an easy way to find people who can make a difference to your bottom line.
I’m going to give you some incredibly useful tips for using Google and Linkedin to discover rich details about the exact type of person you want to reach out to.
Just keep in mind that you never know what type of information really exists about an individual, community, or business until you do some research.
(This is an example covering some tidbits about Boeing Employee Credit Union.) Read more
http://barryhurd.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/barry-hurd-cyber-security-smac.png00Barryhttp://barryhurd.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/barry-hurd-cyber-security-smac.pngBarry2011-11-07 23:04:522011-11-07 23:06:34Social Media for Sales (why social intelligence rocks.)
I apologize if I this article jumps a bit, but I will endeavor to tie it back together…
There is this great statement in the Harvard Business Review that details bullet points of my own thoughts around my eight year old son and an alarming problem in big business:
“When a 12-year-old can gather information faster, process it more efficiently, reference more diverse professionals, and get volunteer guidance from better sources than you can at work, how can you pretend to be competitive?..” Read more
http://barryhurd.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/barry-hurd-cyber-security-smac.png00Barryhttp://barryhurd.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/barry-hurd-cyber-security-smac.pngBarry2010-01-14 01:11:172010-01-14 01:11:17Evolving your business trends... don't slide down the curve