Another entry in the automagic infographic space comes from “vizualize.me”, a new LinkedIn resume visualizer that hopes to cash in on the new craze of flashy colorful resumes. While I think it’s neat to look at, I can’t imagine much real-world use for it, for the reason pointed out by information aesthetics:
While the idea seems certainly useful, one would certainly wish for the availability of more subdued visual styles, in particular for those people who appreciate more classical visual styles when applying for high-end, important jobs. I also foresee some critical comments on the color palette for the ‘language’ world map.
LinkedIn has just come out with another fun way to visualize your social network and employment history via the “Connection Timeline”. It plots your history on a short timeline, and then lets you scrub back and forth across it to see your various connections at that time come and go. It’s surprisingly effective, especially when you see (as I did) someone who you work with now pop up from an old job (or school) that you never knew was actually there.
Somewhat in response to a recent article from Gartner that put the BI space firmly in the hands of Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM, some users started a poll over at LinkedIn (See it here, account required). The results are interesting, with Spotfire coming out way in front.
Now, a few things to note first:
It’s a self-selected sample.. Voters already had LinkedIn accounts and were part of a Data Visualization group
There were only 5 options (the 4 shown and “Other”), so of course people will gravitate to those 4.
It’s interesting to see the difference in opinion. I think Gartner is probably right, simply because of the old adage ”Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”. Smaller companies have more flexible and agile tools, but big business likes buying from big business, so IBM & Microsoft rule those markets.
There are also some interesting demographics to note:
Younger people seemed to gravitate to Tableau. I would bet that’s due to Tableau’s recent success in creating a powerful and easy web-embed friendly visualization system that keeps cropping up all over the internet. Exposure is great advertising.
Most of the people picking “Other” were older “Managers”, somewhat reinforcing my point above. The folks with the money are going elsewhere.
Spotfire, the clear out-and-out winner of the poll had 3/4th of their votes from “all other” people, meaning their job description didn’t fit into the usual suspects. This could indicate a large freelancer base. (I originally thought students, but the age is a bit high)
If you don’t have a LinkedIn account, I’ve included the entire fully-expanded chart after the break (Showing demographic breakdowns for all 5 choices).
O’Reilly’s Strata 2011 Conference is coming soon, and O’Reilly has updated their site with a great interview with LinkedIn Senior Scientist Pete Skomoroch. A short 4-minute video, he discusses important skills every data scientist needs ranging from statistics to knowledge of external API’s.
The first skill, as you might expect, is a base in statistics, algorithms, machine learning, and mathematics. “You need to have a solid grounding in those principles to actually extract signals from this data and build things with it,” Skomoroch said.
Second, a good data scientist is handy with a collection of open-source tools — Hadoop, Java, Python, among others. Knowing when to use those tools, and how to code, are prerequisites.
The third set of skills focus on making products real and making data available to users. “That might mean data visualization, building web prototypes, using external APIs, and integrating with other services,” Skomoroch said. In other words, this one’s a combination of coding skills, an ability to see where data can add value, and collaborating with teams to make these products a reality.
LinkedIn, the Facebook of Work contacts, has created a great new interactive visualization tool for your network, automatically grouping your contacts into areas by similar contacts and allowing you to browse the connections between them. From Mashable’s description:
InMaps is an insight into who the major connections, bridges and influencers are in your network. People with bigger dots and their names in larger fonts have more connections (and typically more sway) in specific clusters. Perhaps that’s why my friend Neal Sales-Griffin, the former president of Northwestern’s student body, is so prominent in my professional graph.
The image above is my network, which you can view yourself at this shared link. The layout and grouping is done automatically, although you then enter your own titles for the groups.
Newsweek has a fun little toy on their website that imports your LinkedIn profile data (or lets you simply fill out a form) and create a ‘treemap’ of your work history.
Your career tree traces the branches of your education and work life, and lets you connect with others who share similar paths. Every addition causes your tree to grow a new branch so the bigger the career, the bigger the tree. And you can share it with Facebook friends and on Twitter!
See my tree above. The size of the circles indicate the length of the job, although I can’t really figure out the rhyme or reason of the branching.
It’s a fun toy, but it has limited use. Merging in information like recommendation, friends, or at least a popup with the description of the job would be more useful.
Another entry in the automagic infographic space comes from “vizualize.me”, a new LinkedIn resume visualizer that hopes to cash in on the new craze of flashy colorful resumes. While I think it’s neat to look at, I can’t imagine much real-world use for it, for the reason pointed out by information aesthetics:
LinkedIn has just come out with another fun way to visualize your social network and employment history via the “Connection Timeline”. It plots your history on a short timeline, and then lets you scrub back and forth across it to see your various connections at that time come and go. It’s surprisingly effective, especially when you see (as I did) someone who you work with now pop up from an old job (or school) that you never knew was actually there.
Newsweek has a fun little toy on their website that imports your LinkedIn profile data (or lets you simply fill out a form) and create a ‘treemap’ of your work history.
VizWorld.com 
Comments