Barklund.org

The twenty-nineth idea for my 365 social ideas is a classic mashup: CatScanner, a charting application and the New York Times Article Search. The charting application could very likely be the previously mentioned Infographic Charting Service for better results (it could actually be built into this service) or it could be build stand-alone using any classic charting API like Google Charts.

Creating cool charts displaying the frequency of articles about Obama vs. McCain or comparing the articles about Obama in his first year vs. previous presidents NYT coverage in their first year are common and quite easy to do. But as previously explained about Twitter Trends, you cannot find what you don’t know you’re looking for. Let’s say we want to see how many articles are posted in NYT about Democrats vs. Republicans. Well, you could search for popular names from both parties, or you could hope that the writers have tagged their articles correctly.

But we can do better than that, as the Wikipedia category system will give us names of most politicians from both parties. Thus we can use these lists to create large queries about all Democrats vs. all Republicans and receive these numbers correctly.

Why?

This is a classic mashup displaying the power of combining commercial content (NYT articles) with crowd-sourced information (Wikipedia CatScanner) with generalized tools (charting API’s like Google Charts) with little effort for huge results. And this puts cretaing complicated charts back in the hands of everyone, not just the few who are good at both API’s and PhotoShop.

What’s next?

Do with this idea whatever you like – expand, implement, trash or forget. Just remember, that if you use it in anyway make sure to attribute me according to the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, that all these 365 Social Ideas are published under.

Related posts:

1. Comment On Everything – January 2010 Ideas
2. Google Docs Application – January 2010 Ideas
3. Social Traffic Analyzer – January 2010 Ideas