BlogBurst for getting blogs into mainstream media

Posted on Tuesday 21 February 2006

DeepMarket just signed up for and was accepted to the BlogBurst network.

What is BlogBurst?

“BlogBurst is the first and only service that combines people and technology for the purpose of presenting blog content on major online properties.”

Translation (to the best of my understanding) -> BlogBurst is trying to connect mainstream media (looks like newspapers mostly for now) to high quality and timely blog content. The benefits for media are stories that may never have been reported on and free (as in beer) content. The benefits for the bloggers are high profile connections from media to their blog and potentially new types of revenue streams in the future (my own assumption).

Sounds like a win-win situation to me.

Administrator @ 11:48 pm
Filed under: Blogs
Win $250 for Blogging

Posted on Tuesday 21 February 2006

BlogParty is a new network of sites that try to help leverage your blog, but they need your help getting the message out there. How about some motivation? How about the chance to win $250 for writting an entry in your blog about BlogParty with a link back to www.blogparty.net?

For details, check out the Blog Party Blog. Good Luck!

Administrator @ 11:38 pm
Filed under: Blogs
Compression of Information Display - playing with Sparklines

Posted on Tuesday 14 February 2006

One of the major problems in dealing with large amounts of data is the eventual presentation to a human being. Humans - constantly making things harder to develop and deploy. Even worse is the eventuality that the data needs to be interactive. The phrase “that looks too busy” is not very encouraging when you are trying to compress complex data into bite size and easily digestible pieces. Edward Tufte is famous for trying to do just this - make complex data immediately make sense. My first introduction to Tufte was an interesting poster (not created by him, but by Charles Joseph Minard) that depicts Napoleon’s army in the failed Russian campaign of 1812. I had not actually looked at any of Tufte’s work in many years, but recently found the Sparkline PHP Graphing Library. Tufte had come up with Sparklines in his book (still unreleased) “Beautiful Evidence” and called them “intense, simple, wordlike graphics”. Wow - those are pretty cool.

I had recently re-run the correlation between all the stocks in the NASDAQ over the previous 250 days. This seems to be an interesting way of presenting the data. As it stood, I had a list of the top positively correlated and top negatively correlated stocks with a cutoff of about + and - .75 for every stock in the NASDAQ. No graphics and it really didn’t highlight the fact that over the past 250 days, these stock looked like they moved together (no implication of causation - just simple correlation). So, in addition to the list of stocks correlated with a particular stock, I added a nice little Sparkline with 250 days of the closing price. Now you can look at a stock like Google and immediately see the stocks with positive correlation have a similar 45 degree slope upwards and the negatively correlated stocks are quite the opposite. The QQQ has a generally positive move upwards, but a bumpy ride - as do those stocks correlated with it. It is interesting to note that Intel has no stocks correlated (plus or minus) higher than .80, but with the Sparklines you can easily see the stocks that had movement closest to INTC.

I have to thank James Byers for putting together the Sparkline project.

Administrator @ 3:46 am
Filed under: Creativity and Stock Market and Stocks