Researchers have long said that the material published on the Web amounts to a form of “collective intelligence” that can be used to spot trends and make predictions.

Using his 20% time, a Google employee discovered that during flu season, many ailing Americans enter phrases like “flu symptoms” into Google and other search engines before they call their doctors. When he mapped this data, he was able to discover where flu outbreaks would strike up to two weeks before traditional news sources were able to report them. http://www.google.org/flutrends/

This is an example of a time when merging a specific type of data to its geographical coordinates resulted in a unique insight. However, there is much more to do with data and visualization. What was found at Google is only the tip of a very large iceberg. Now that we have access to so much data on the web, we're going to see an increasing need to understand and present that data.

Agenda: This meetup will serve as an introduction to what's going on in the world of data viz. It will be freeform, so if you would like to demonstrate something you're working on, please be prepared to do so. Micah Elliott will be showing uGraph and Ed Borasky will do a GGobi demo. I'll be covering what already exists in the ecosystem and what might become useful in the future. We're dealing with a rapid communication method here. Something that, if done well, compresses the time and space it takes for us to understand something.

If you're interested in Data Visualization, please come to this event. It will be the first Portland Tech Event at WebTrends besides Web Analytics Wednesday. It's our chance to try out the space and see if it is a good fit for this group or potentially for other groups in the future.

Google Group: Ed Borasky recently started a Google group called pdx-visualization. As the name implies, it is a group for Portland-area people interested in languages and techniques for visualization of data. http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-visualization

Amber Case, @caseorganic is a Cyborg Anthropologist studying the interaction between humans and computers and how our relationship with information is changing the way we think, act, and understand the world around us.

R, also called GNU S, is a strongly functional language and environment to statistically explore data sets and make many graphical displays of data.

R is widely used for statistical software development and data analysis. R is part of the GNU project, and its source code is freely available under the GNU General Public License, and pre-compiled binary versions are provided for various operating systems. R uses a command line interface, though several graphical user interfaces are available.

Ed Borasky will provide an introduction to R this Saturday at Cubespace from 11Am-3Pm. Please come prepared with a laptop and the requisite software (link to come soon). If you have any issues installing the software, or need help before the meeting, feel free to arrive at 10:30 Am.

Software Downloads Updated to get ready for the upcoming class. There will be a few more pages coming. The first will be on installing GGobi, and the second will be on CRAN Task Views.

Click on http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-visualization/web/getting-started-with-the-r-programming-language - or copy & paste it into your browser's address bar if that doesn't work.

Here's an abbreviated "Getting Started With GGobi" guide. Please try this stuff out and let me know where it's broken. I just ran through the Windows part and the "Testing on a Social Network Dataset" part and that much of it works. :)

Click on http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-visualization/web/getting-started-with-ggobi - or copy & paste it into your browser's address bar if that doesn't work.

I added a couple of links to articles on using GGobi with social network data.

Click on http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-visualization/web/getting-started-with-ggobi - or copy & paste it into your browser's address bar if that doesn't work.

About R

R was created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and is now developed by the R Development Core Team. It is named partly after the first names of the first two R authors (Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka), and partly as a play on the name of S. The R language has become a de facto standard among statisticians for the development of statistical software.

More information: http://www.r-project.org/

Join the Portland Data Visualization Google Group for more updates: http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-visualization?hl=en.

Monitorama is an 3-day event for Dev and Ops practitioners to gather and discuss the past, present, and future of monitoring software and trends. Our lineups often include more abstract discussions of software craftsmanship and dealing with the human side of failure, but the common thread through the entire event is to advance the state of art for all software monitoring-related technologies and methodologies.