Week 5 #11

I played with two sites from the Web 2.0 Awards short list, they were both under visual arts but they were completely different! The first was Colorblender (colorblender.com), you slide the little bars around to change your primary color and it gives a palette of colors that match. Sort of interesting, there was no explanation that I could find on how it picked the other colors or why or anything. There was a link to all of the saved palettes that other people had created, you saw the colors and what the user had named it, things like kitchen, or bathroom so I am guessing people were using it to find complementary colors for painting. The Behr Paint web site has a much nicer color picker, you can actually choose a room, a room size and paint the walls to see what it would look like, much easier to use and much more fun, if you register you can upload photos of your rooms and paint them electronically. (http://behr.com)

The other site was Swivel. This site allows you to upload data, like spreadsheets, and make tables, graphs, and charts. If you share them other people can add tags, and comments. There are some Official data suppliers like the US Census bureau, US Geological Survey, World Bank, and lots of others. You can also compare different graphs, not all of them though, I think just the public data from Official sources, not the private data the ordinary users upload. After a little searching I came across a dataset on public libraries in Alaska! Some of the columns had information on income like how much state, local, and federal money the different libraries received, number of employees, circulation statistics, usage by kids, and much more. Did you know that for whatever year this data is from the Kuskokwim library received the most state funding? $113,488.oo. Here is the link http://www.swivel.com/data_sets/show/1011741

Swivel is not an easy site to use. I never could get it to show me the entire dataset in order of most state income to lowest state income. It would move the rows to the correct order but then you could no longer see the amounts, it was very frustrating.

I guess you could use this to share data about useage like kids coming in at lunch, or classes signed up, or circulation statistics, budgets, ect. I don't think we would get data from everyone to upload it and I'm not sure we would want to make it public anyway. I was thinking it might be neat to make a graph that could be added to a website that showed checkouts by team or by grade but I have no idea how I would get that information out of SIRSI! That was another thing, the tour said that you could email graphs and export them ect. but I couldn't find anyway to do that with this data, again I think it may be the public private thing. Anyway, interesting but frustrating.

I already belong to a Ning. Ann set one up for the Anchorage school librarians.