Where did my tax dollars go?

And now the winners of Google's "Data Viz Challenge"! The Grand Prize went to Anil Kandangath for the visualization above. Here's a description of the competition from the site:

"Every year, Americans fill out income tax forms and make a payment to the IRS. It’s an important civic duty, but it is also a lot of money. Where does it all go? Using data provided by WhatWePayFor.com, we challenged artists, coders, and the general public to create data visualizations that would make it easier for U.S. citizens to understand how the government spends our tax money."

Try out Anil's winning entry and the rest of the competition here:

Google Data Visualization Competition Winners

Google and the Digital Disruption

Google's CEO and Director of Ideas discuss their essay "The Digital Disruption", the role of connectivity and information technologies in foreign affairs, and the inherent issues of promoting these kinds of technologies in countries like China and Iran.

Summary from the original essay:

Increased connectivity allows for the spread of liberal, open values but also poses a number of dangers. To foster the free flow of information and challenge authoritarian regimes, democratic states will have to learn to create alliances with people and companies at the forefront of the information revolution.



About the authors:

ERIC SCHMIDT is Chair and CEO of Google. He is a Member of the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology and Chair of the New America Foundation. JARED COHEN is Director of Google Ideas. He is an Adjunct Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Children of Jihad and One Hundred Days of Silence: America and the Rwanda Genocide.

Read more:

• The Digital Disruption (essay)

Are humans the new Google?

Can human-driven search from companies like Facebook and Amazon beat algorithmic search giant Google? Interesting reading:

How Facebook Plans to Kill Google (GOOG)

Google Code Blog: Introducing Google Browser Size

This Google project explores superimposing browser dimension data over a URL to determine what percentage of users see which portions of a page. The original intent was to solve a very specific problem in which users of Google Earth were not seeing a download button.

Google Code Blog: Introducing Google Browser Size

Google Wave 101

Concise description of what Google Wave it, how it works and some links to tools and extensions.

Google Wave 101 - Search Engine Watch (SEW)

More description and screenshots over at Lifehacker:

http://lifehacker.com/5370738/google-wave-first-look

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Usability enhancements announced for Google Search

Some of the changes:

• Quick, in-browser viewing of Google Docs
• An improved interface for local information in web search
• Access to multiple providers in weather results
• Search options panel for mobile 

Read more:
Facebook | Google: This week in search 10/9/09

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Google Wave First Look

Screen grabs from a developer preview: Google Wave First Look - Google Wave - Lifehacker

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Getting Hands On with Google Wave

Ars takes you inside of Google's bold vision for the future of Internet messaging with this hands-on look at Wave. Learn more about the experimental service, its underlying technology, and the opportunities that will provide for third-party developers.

Turning the tide: a hands-on look at Google's Wave - Ars Technica

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Google Wave adds more users

Google Wave is ready for its next step: a more thorough test of its scalability and stability as more than 100,000 new users crowd onto the service.

Google Wave ready for wider testing via CNET



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Search, Trends and Google

Ok, I can admit I have a problem: I love usage data. It's fascinating to peek into the numbers behind a user experience and try to understand not just what users are doing, but why and how. More about data and AddThis later, but years ago at AOL I designed the original "Hot Searches" product that showed which search terms were rising and falling the fastest. From these humble beginnings grew two fun AOL programmed destinations, Hot Searches and AOL's year end Hot Searches retrospectives.

More recently, Google has integrated their Hot Trends data into search results, one more volley into the battle of real-time search:

Google Hot Trends Integrated Into Google Search via SearchEngineLand


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