Why is Pinterest Spamming Your Facebook Friends? There’s no doubt that what interest-aggregation site Pinterest has managed over the past few months is spectacular. Recently reaching the milestone of 10 million users, the site has gained traction faster than just about any other site in history. But with that growth comes the responsibility to handle it and the site seems to be falling into spammer territory. A couple of hours ago (as of the time that I’m writing this), Google’s Don Dodge started tweeting that Pinterest was sending him a mass amount of emails saying that he had been followed on the site, and then asking him to follow that person back.
Rightly suspicious by the volume of emails that were being sent, Dodge connected directly to one of the people to ask whether the request was made: “They said they received an email from me saying I followed them on Pinterest, and suggested they follow me back.” Need further proof? A couple of questions obviously come to mind. So what’s the right answer? Pingram. Curating digital content. Visualising data – a catalogue of resources « iapresentation. Visualizing.org. Data visualisation DIY: our top tools | News. What data visualisation tools are out there on the web that are easy to use - and free? Here on the Datablog and Datastore we try to do as much as possible using the internet's powerful free options. That may sound a little disingenuous, in that we obviously have access to the Guardian's amazing Graphics and interactive teams for those pieces where we have a little more time - such as this map of public spending (created using Adobe Illustrator) or this Twitter riots interactive.
But for our day-to-day work, we often use tools that anyone can - and create graphics that anyone else can too. So, what do we use? Google fusion tables This online database and mapping tool has become our default for producing quick and detailed maps, especially those where you need to zoom in. The main advantage is the flexibility - you can can upload a kml file of regional borders, say - and then merge that with a data table.
This excellent tutorial by Google's Kathryn Hurley is a great place to start. Datamarket. Gentlemint - a mint of manly things.