Track Swine Flu On Google Maps

Google Henry Niman has published a Google Maps application to track the recent Swine Flu outbreak around the World. Google Google Maps platform is a great way to quickly publish applications regarding current events.

For a Swine Flu tracking application I would like to see someone do any of the following:

• add a timeline and be able to view how the disease spread, just like the Google News Timeline launched at Google Labs
• notification via e-mail or twitter if there was a case reported around your location
• be able to compare the patterns of this outbreak with that of SARS or some other disease

Comment if you know of any application that does any of the above.

Free Ad-Hoc Business Intelligence and Database Reporting

I struggled for the past week searching for an easy to use, intuitive and ad-hoc business reporting tool. Today I came across Wabit from SQL Power - a Canadian consulting firm that specializes in business intelligence reporting. There are a lot of software out there, but they were either not free, complicated to setup, or required SQL knowledge.

Wabit is really easy to use and SQL Power did a really great job making the interface as intuitive and easy to use as possible. One thing I really needed is the ability to drag and drop tables onto my canvas and select which columns I need for a specific report. Wabit does exactly this, and does it very well.

It also comes with a WYSIWYG editor to design the report, you can drop labels in, drag in the queries you built and finally export the report to PDF.

When I started looking for a Business Intelligence database reporter I started looking for web applications, I figure that would be easiest way to get one, but I was wrong. The first database reporter I came across seemed promising after using the online demo was xreporter. It turned out to be complicated to setup with different components that needed to be installed and configured separately and then I was not able to get it to work. To make matters worse the available resources did not help me figuring out what I did wrong.

Slowly over the past week I came to accept that free, opensource, online BI tools are either non existent or very badly marketed. Today I decided to change my search angle, and decided to look for BI tools for Macs. I have a Mac and when I need an application for something I had no troubles finding it. Lo and behold after 20 minutes of searching there it was - the business intelligence tool for the rest of us. If you are not looking for bells and whistles in your BI tool, give this one a try.

Finally Wabit comes for Mac OS, Windows and Linux which is the other secondary requirement. I'm a PC and my customer is a Mac, so if I were going to walk him through using it, or troubleshoot problems I need to have it as well so this is great.

One problem I did find - not directly with the application but with Postgres - is that Postgres does not support cross-database queries. After generating a query through the GUI and then dropping the query within the report you will get a :

"ERROR: cross-database references are not implemented".

To resolv this just edit the SQL Wabit generates and remove the [DATABASE_NAME].[TABLE_NAME] from the FROM and WHERE clauses.

Wordle - Still Beautiful Word Clouds

Generating a tag cloud is an art in itself, Wordle has perfected this art. I will try and generate a word cloud from this blog every month to try and visualize the topics I have been talking and ranting about here. Heres today's Wordle - click it to view a large size.



Tag clouds do not just have to convey information using the size of each word, we are already restricted about what we can convey so one really needs to maximize the number of ways information can be conveyed. Word size is only one way, but we can also think about orientation of the words and color as Wordle does very well.

I have not seen a tag cloud yet that relates which words show up together. For example, am I using Twitter as an application? or a Twitter for advetising? or Twitter to expirement with advertising my blog?

If you know about a word cloud that makes use of more than just font size, color and orientation please share here. I'm always interested in different ways to visualize data especially when you are constrained in what you can do to visualize it.

Pimp Your Slides Using Prezi.com

Learned about this neat presentation online application called Prezi. 100% online, free to use with some limitations (no private presentations, 100MB limit). Still awesome application, easy to learn and fun to use.

Love it.

Decided to give it a test drive and make a prezi out of my last topic "How To: Use Twitter Feed and Bitly to Promote your Blog"


Sorry about the bad quality images, I just saved them off the sites.



Link to it here or view full size/full screen: http://bit.ly/PoJB3

How To: Use Twitter Feed and Bitly to Promote your Blog

A couple of weeks ago I joined twitter in effort to experiment more with promoting my blog and get a bit more traffic.

Before I get into that, rule number one in generating traffic is

Content is King

Now I am not an expert in advertising via the social media nor advertising via any media, but I have learned a lot about promoting your blog and self using twitter over the past few weeks. As I learn more I will share more.

Seed your blog with content first
Don't start promoting if your blog is empty. Seed it with good, interesting and valuable content. Whether it is advice, comments on something you read in the news, challenges and how you overcame them (or if you did not, then what did you try and did not work) . So have some content on there so that when someone does visit, they are not welcomed by just a few short posts that do not add any value.

Creating good titles for your posts
When you create a post the first title you save it with is used to generate the URL for that post. So titles are very important and a good title will help that content get ranked on search engines and help your blog overall. A good tip I read was to first pick a series of words that will describe the new post best. For this post I picked "Use Twitter Feed Bitly Promote Blog Tips Suggestions". Publish the post with that title and then go back and add a proper title to it.

Join Twitter
Twitter is more than just reading what your friends are up to. Use twitter to stay up to date on news, weather, topics, technology, cars or whatever else interests you. Don't limit your follows to people you know, follow people based on what they are contributing - if what they posted today was valuable to you, odds are something they will post tomorrow will also be valuable. A lot of companies have joined twitter and promote their products and services on twitter. Follow these companies to get updates, news, and even help with their products.

Unlike Facebook where you can get 10,000 friends without even knowing 2% of them, you need to add value for someone to follow you, sure you can follow him, but the idea is to build your online identity; an interesting online identity. If your online identity revolves around following 10,000 people and not adding value then the opportunity you had there will not come again. Celebrities are a special case, even if they don't post that often. (If you are a celebrity and reading this post please leave a comment, if your're not still comment!)

Blog. Check. Twitter. Check. What's next?
So by now you have some good content on your blog, and you have built a small network on Twitter. Now what about Twitter Feed and Bitly?

Twitter Feed
Twitter Feed will publish your posts on Twitter on your behalf. Just sign up for an account and authorize it to do so by providing your username and password for Twitter or by authenticating your Twitter Feed username with Twitter. You can configure how often you want it to check your posts and what to prefix each post with.
Most if not every blogging tool provides you with a URL where your blog's RSS feed is published to. Simple point TwitterFeed to that RSS Feed and you are done.

Why use #hashtag for your blog posts?
I used #NESBlog to prefix my blog tweets giving me a way to easily search Twitter and see if any of my posts were retweeted. None so far, but I only started this yesterday. I'm optimistic I'll get my moment of fame sooner or later.

bit.ly
bit.ly is a url shortener. It also allows you to track each url and see how visits each got. Sign up for an account and configure TwitterFeed to use your bit.ly username and API key. There are many other services that do this, bit.ly was just the first I signed up for and so far its working out well.

Next time TwitterFeed reads your blog's RSS feed it will send your last post as:


Note: If your posts show up on twitter with a "You must be authentication to a ..." the bit.ly API key is incorrect. Copy it and paste it back in again carefully.

That covers the set of tips I learned over the past few weeks at promoting my blog using Twitter, Twitter Feed, and Bitly url shortening.

Don't forget to comment and let me know what you think or share some other tips!

PhotoMap: Snap, Grab and Walk away

Following an earlier post about improving university campus maps I found this neat mobile application that allows you to make better use of a physical map.

Basically you snap a photo of the map whether its at a theme park, mall or university and have the application read your phone's GPS coordinates at two landmarks and mark the landmarks on the image.

Now you can walk around and follow yourself on that map. Definitely a handy little app to have next time you are feeling like a tourist or a freshman on a campus on your first day of classes.

Twitter Mail and Blogger Atlast

Since I joined twitter a few weeks back I have been trying to figure out how to get my posts here automatically tweeted without me having to tweet each one individually. I was going about it the wrong way, I was looking for a widget that would do this.

I was just looking over my settings and I noticed this "send posts to e-mail" field where I had my own email in there to get my own copy of my posts somewhere other than just blogger.com. That's when I had an 'Aha' moment and decided to look for a service that would provide me with an e-mail and they would post the e-mail message to twitter - enter TwitterMail.

You login with your twitter credentials and then you can pick your email address @twittermail.com
(something long and that you cannot remember)

Then give that e-mail to blogger and bookmark it in gmail, hotmail, yahoo, or outlook if you are still using that - so you can use it there too.

So this post is a test of this process.

There is also twitterfeed that I have seen people use, so thats always another option.