Google Public: Unemployment Rate Charting

Last night I viewed a great web video provided by TedBlog and Reddit in which Reddit users submitted questions to Hans Rosling.

Mr. Rosling is one of the most accomplished public speakers I’ve seen utilizing data and statistics to tell important stories, debunking myths, and generally inspiring discovery using visual analytics.

He also created a wonderful statistical animation tool with one of his children called Trendalyzer.  The Gapminder Foundation tool was acquired by Google in March of 2006.  Happily, Google seems intent on providing great free content using the tool.

I would credit him along with Stephen Few as the two most significant influences on me related to data visualization and telling stories using data.

You are probably aware of Hans Rosling from his wonderful Ted presentations.

In the interview Hans answers a variety of questions from Reddit users.  One of the more interesting examples he provided came from Google Public.

Google has created a very nice charting engine to visualize unemployment data provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The visualization is very well done, following best practices for time series display.  It’s also provides significant granularity with county-level data available via a couple of clicks. Google seems to be integrating the Gapminder tool for visualizing the data. 

I hope we see a lot more of this sort of thing from Google.  Read more about the tool at The Office Google Blog.  Highly recommended.

If any of you are aware of other examples of public data being visualized effectively I’d love to hear from you about those.