Love or hate Google, you gotta admit it provides some of the best web services out there - maps, docs, mail - and all for free. One of the latest tools they've released is Public Data Explorer, a way of making important public data into brilliant graphs.

The Data Explorer is a data visualisation tool turning dry as dust spreadsheets into colourful and interactive infographics. Love it. See the fertility v life expectancy chart embedded above.

It works with public data - so information on birth rates, GDP and other info from charities and public bodies. You can't add your own data, but you can adjust and then embed the graphs.

Google say:
Students, journalists, policy makers and everyone else can play with the tool to create visualizations of public data, link to them, or embed them in their own webpages. Embedded charts and links can update automatically so you're always sharing the latest available data. Here's an example of an embedded visualization.

Public Data Explorer is still in Google Labs

[via Businessinsider]

Ah dating, love it or hate it, it's got to be done unless you are lucky enough to be a)in a relationship b)have a great cat and don't give a damn.

Anyway, it makes it all a bit easier when it's on your iPhone: saving you time, money and sparing you those awkward moments when you don't know what to say (just pretend you're off-line).

We have trawled the app store for the best iPhone dating apps and come up with ten.

Click on the image below to start the gallery.

I keep getting emails about this new jeans brand. I usually shunt anything about fashion straight out of my inbox and leave that to the lovely ladies over on ShinyStyle, but this Schultz brand has a smoking hot ad campaign that despite myself I kept inadvertently clicking on. Yes, that's one up there.

It's like American Apparel but the male models are more naked and muscular. I can see this going down quite well with gay male community, as indeed it seems to have done.

What's the deal? well you know the scenario these hot guys just like putting those Schultz jeans on and roaming around the desert leaving their fly undone while they pour petrol onto their belts. For some reason they don't need belts, who knows? who cares? Anyway, I just decided to share it..

See the Schultz site here
Schultz jeans and underwear for men and women

Have you heard of Spotify? Last.fm? It seems lots of people haven't. Research by Consumer Focus announced that four in ten people can't name a single legal online music service.

Of the music fans that were aware of such services, 85% could only name Amazon and iTunes. Doing the maths, that means that only a measly 9% of people are aware of the 20-odd sites such as Spotify, last.fm and We7 where you can legally listen to music.

And whose fault is that? Perhaps digital music music companies should take some of the rap for failing to educate people about legal music sites. This is a missed opportunity for the labels to make money from the legal sites, it's also encourages piracy as people try to listen to stuff illegally instead.

"Illegal services threaten the music industry by side-stepping the artists and ultimately taking revenues from the development of new music. When combined with the risks of malware and virus attacks and a clear lack of awareness into the alternatives to the consumer, what more can be done to stamp out piracy and help the industry, consumer and artist alike, to share music and listen without compromise?" a We7 statement read.

Because today is International Women's Day, we thought we'd look at some of the gadgets that have done their bit for women's liberation in the centuries past.

A lot of these are devices that reduce domestic labour. That's not because women are hardwired to appreciate dishwashers at the expense of fancier or bigger bits of hardware it's because women have been forced into doing domestic labour for centuries; so, devices which make those tasks more efficient and less time-consuming are device that have helped women or anyone forced into domestic labour. Currently women earn 10% of the world's income, yet work two-thirds of the world's working hours

Ultimately it is laws and social attitudes that liberate women and mean that work (whatever it is) gets shared equally, but these little gadgets have helped along the way.

click on the image below to start the gallery

Sci-fi flick District 9 has just picked up the movie accolade no film director wants to win: the most bit-torrented Oscar nominee. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/d7/District_nine_ver2.jpg/75px-District_nine_ver2.jpg

Filesharing blog TorrentFreak, listed the most illegally downloaded Oscar "Best Picture" nominee films for 2010: it's one download, one vote and top of the polls was District 9. While the Hurt Locker might have picked up the actual one: this is how the internet voted:

1. District 9 - 12,639,000
2. Avatar - 11,326,000
3. The Hurt Locker - 7,930,000
4. Up - 5,437,000
5. Inglourious Basterds - 5,376,000
6. Precious - 4,922,000
7. Up In The Air - 4,855,000
8. A Serious Man - 3,836,000
9. The Blind Side - 1,845,000
10. An Education - 683,000

[via Torrentfreak]

I know we seem a bit obsessed with Chatroulette on this blog - that's because we are. From the get-go this whole shebang has always looked like A Great Thing To Do With Friends. Doing Chatroulette with a friend is like when you go to a club and sit in the corner making snarky comments about the other people in the room - but way more fun because the people on Chatroulette are actually weird and there are loads more

Anyway, someone's done a Chatroulette party I am delighted to say, in New York of course. All it takes is a hall with a seating area and a good projector. Oh and a hostess too.

Okay it is a bit weird, but no weirder than fox hunting and people do that for pleasure.

Apparently the C'roulette partners get a bit freaked out by suddenly facing a room full of people. But some of them really like it and start acting up something major.

Okay, so who wants to organise one of these in England?

[full account here, NYMag]

Conclusive proof that yes they are mumbling

In a weird announcement yesterday, the mayor of Topeka, a small city in Kansas USA, decided to rename his town "Google", for a month. A decision that will certainly improve the city's SEO, but sounds, in almost all other respects, ridiculous.

But it's not just whimsical - the town's mayor wants Topeka, sorry Google, Kansas, to be one of the places where Google tests out its super-duper high speed internet part of its "Fiber for Communities" programme. He's hoping the name change will attract Google's attention to his city and make it one of the 100 locations where the internet giant trials the programme.

Google's move to provide wired internet at speeds 100x the current average (hitting 1gigabyte a second) has been seen as an aggressive stunt by Internet providers who see it creating immense demand for this kind of service among the public that the the Internet providers will have to step up and fulfill. Google is forcing them to launch a whole new product in other words and they don't like it.

Back to the key issue here: what if we all started naming towns after internet services? How about living in Picasa, Oklahoma or working in Hotmail, New York. That would be crazy.

[via CNN tech]

We wrote a couple of days ago about a mood app that plots feelings on maps (Glow by Heckcopter) and this web game from Childline is a very similar thing. Except that it doesn't just record your mood out of general interest - it tries to change or improve it. Aimed at kids, the "how u feelin" game, on Childline here, uses smilies as simple shorthand for feelings and is aimed at making expressing emotions a bit easier. Once those emotions have been expressed then it's easier for Childline to offer the appropriate advice.

You could say smilies are a bit simplistic or patronising for explaining this kind of thing - but I think it's a fair enough way of reaching people. Simple doesn't always equal simplistic and as a easy-to-use diagnostic tool, it works well. Plus given that I use them all the time to express my emotions, I could hardly complain about it.

Most like the Glow Mood Map is the Moodi Maker which lets you make a customised smiley expressing a certain emotion, it stores and lets you see what everyone else on Childline is feeling that day - today 33% are happy, 11% are depressed, 10% are excited, 3% are amused, 1% are embarrassed.

That's not just interesting, that's also a pretty useful gauge of what services users might need and whether things improve or worsen over time. It also gives a sense of community and support - you're not the only one with problems.

How computers can be used to improve the mood and attitude of their users is pretty interesting, this is just a simple example but there are more complex and commerical ones out there: the Samsung Wave concept products for example. These respond to emotion in your voice or gestures and try and work out what services to provide you in order to match your mood.

Related: CES 2010: ASUS's Waveface concept computers know how you're feeling and Glow mood map iPhone app shows what cities are happy...

The most fun you can have in front of a webcam, Chatroulette is everybody's favourite new NSFW video chat site. But here are five things you didn't know about it:

1. It was founded by a seventeen year-old Russian programmer called Andrey Ternovskiy, who started it for him and his friends to chat on.
[NY Times]

2. You get blocked for 10 minutes if you use the term "asl" in the text chat (as in the age/sex/location question favoured by gay men in the aol chatrooms of the 90s, don't ask me how I know). Saying "fuck" is fine though. I don't know what the reasoning behind that is. I tried - it's true: look:

3. You get blocked for posting pornographic images. Yes, you may well look surprised. "Chatroulette does not tolerate broadcasting obscene, offending, pornographic material and we will have to block users who violate these rules from using our service" these are the terms of use of the site- at least 50% of users certainly haven't read these. Or just had taken their underwear off already and then couldn't be bothered to put it back on again.

4. French Connection ie the clothing brand have got into Chatroulette, for advertising purposes. They're offering £250 FCUK vouchers for any guy who gets a date through the site. How do you prove you got a date through the site? I don't know. Presumably they do. [shiny]

5. Web academics predict that the penises will go and be replaced by celebrities: "After ChatRoulette users become more acquainted with the system (ie., do not browse solely to explore), we predict a decrease in explicit content, an increase in the consolidation of content genres, and an increase in the formation of celebrity figures." say the webecology team, an interdisciplinary research group based in Boston, USA.

I would like to report that people have been seen masturbating with lettuce and "real" raccoons and - but I doubt that would surprise anyone.

See also: Getting Blocked on Chatroulette: when people use the Report button the wrong way

Related: French Connection in rubbish Chatroulette competition and Catroulette: Chatroulette + Cats = LOVE

In case you missed the hype Chatroulette started at the end of last year and it randomly connects users from around the world, enabling them to communicate using webcam, text and images. Much of the time though users share webcam footage with each other and much of it is, (our research team reckons about 10%) shall we say, of a slightly raucous nature.

Now, unbelievably, it seems brands are using to run competitions.

Once famous for their edgy (at the time anyhow) FCUK campaign, they are using the site to run a competition where men are being asked to set up a real date with a girl on the site. The bloke not only gets a date but also £250 worth of French Connection vouchers.

The competition is part of French Connection's The Man, The Woman campaign launched in February, which aims to draw more attention to its men's range of clothing. You can find more about it on their blog here.

Here's how you enter

If you can prove to have successfully charmed a woman, by copying and pasting your discussion with her into our comments section, we will reward you with beefy praise on MANIFESTO, and the best response will win the vouchers. Remember the challenge is lost as soon as the lady removes herself from your company, so get copying as soon as you have flirtation!

And if you're thinking about cheating, we have a crack team of chat-based checkers who will go through every entry and hunt down frauds. If caught, they'll hunt you down and shame you in the most terrible way known to man. They will tell your mother.

Well it obviously sounds like a non competition and I think is more about FCUK trying to grab a bit of Chatroulette's cool than engaging with real users. Makes them sound a bit desperate really.

What do you reckon?

Given how weird and fun random chat service Chatroulette is (how addictive it is here), it was only a matter of time before someone made it even better by focussing on what really makes it great: watching other people's cats on webcam.

Okay. Catroulette isn't actually a service, it's a tumblr image blog of cats on Chatroulette, paired up with images of their chat-partners: girls in sunglasses, guys in their underwear - the usual glorious combination. Plus sometimes other cats in great moments of cat-to-cat connection. Catroulette just celebrates the cat-related highlights of this random site - capturing the fleeting moments of joy, bafflement or AW CUTE on the faces of the cat's chat partners.

It's a treat. Submit pics of your cat's own random adventures to the blog.

Related: Chatroulette: video-chat with randoms on scary but addictive new site and Popjam - a Facebook app that hooks you up with randoms on chat

Labs at Gmail just got a little shake-up according to the Gmail blog. Apps that made the cut and have become fully fledged Gmail features include my favourite custom colour labels and youtube previews. Apps that got the boot include "random signatures" and "location in signature". Here's the list:

Graduating:
Search Autocomplete
Go To Label
Forgotten Attachment Detector
YouTube Previews
Custom Label Colors
Vacation Dates

Retiring:
Muzzle
Fixed Width Font
Email Addict
Location in Signature
Random Signature

Google's main criteria for graduating or retiring apps is their popularity, so what do these sucesses and failures tell us about gmail and gmail users?

I reckon it shows that they're frenetic powermail users who need to deal with huge amounts of mail and apps which help them do that are popular. Greater variety of label colours helps organise mail, search auto-complete and youtube previews save time.

Sweet funny touches like random signatures ain't so popular with gmaillers cause it's all about power and efficiency. That cute quote from Ghandi/Hello Kitty just ain't what these guys want. Email addict turned gmail off for 15 minutes to make you take a break and do something relaxing. I don't think gmaillers want breaks, they just want more information.
Similarly, Muzzle was an app which stopped gchat contacts' status updates showing up, saving screen real estate, but in practice we all want more not less, so that didn't take off either.

Related: The G-board: a keyboard just for Gmail

Vouchers are big, we're coming out of recession, thrift is chic and getting £10 off Marks&Spencers is always good whatever the global economy is doing. Given the rise of online shopping, it is hardly surprising that sites collecting online vouchers have got big too. Online vouchers are usually promotional codes that you can fill in on retail websites and will get you discounts on your purchase

Like other voucher collation sites, Voucherhub makes its money by getting affiliate links from the sites you click through to. So they are paid by, say, Debenhams when a sale is made following a click through from a voucher on their site.

Unlike other voucher sites they allow users to upload vouchers as well. I met the people from Voucherhub last week and they told me that's what makes them different from the average voucher site. User-added vouchers could be from small companies wanting to upload a voucher code for their shop or just codes that people have spotted on the internet or in magazines and want to share.

The risk of course is that user-uploaded vouchers don't work, or haven't all the details filled in correctly: for example the expiry date, so, that's why Voucherhub have had to introduce a ratings system to show the reliability of the vouchers uploaded. Some are 0%, some are 100%, some are 33%. It uses a widget to detect when the voucher might have expired based on when ratings fall.

Alex Rabarts from Voucherhub told me that they don't make any money off the user-generated coupons but that they feel having a larger number of coupons on the site is good for the users and good for them because it brings people to site.

Punters are ready to try out things that might not work, Alex said, and a community builds up around the site so people help each other to find the right ones and share good experiences.

At the time of writing, the most popular voucher on their site was a £10 TopShop voucher - a code that was in fact uploaded by a user. Apparently there are: over 3,000 active discounts on the site and the average user-reported savings (per order) is £16.

Their US sister site RetailMeNot is the biggest voucher or as they say "coupon" collecting site in the American market, working in exactly the same way. While US RetailMeNot was launched in 2006, UK Voucherhub was not launched till September 09 so it has a much smaller portion of the market. Vouchercodes.uk is the biggest vouhcer site in the UK currently with others like www.myvouchercodes.co.uk. Others include:
Vouchercodes - www.vouchercodes.co.uk
Latestdiscountvouchers - www.latestdiscountvouchers.co.uk/
Vouchers UK - www.vouchersuk.co.uk/

If real rabbits are cute, and toys shaped like rabbits are cute then toy rabbits massaging the ears of real rabbits in a mildly sexual but mostly cute way is the best thing ever. Okay it's a bit dull to start with but wait till the toy rabbit's upward arm motion catches the real rabbit's ears and they flop up and down in the cutest way ever... Well l like it anyway.

Thanks to the New York Times's online dictionary we now know what words New York Times readers don't know and need to look up. It's a not particularly useful but quite interesting list.

The NYT has an inbuilt dictionary which pops up a link to a definition when you click or highlight a word - so by counting clicks they can measure what words send people scuttling to the paper's dictionary.

And - deep breath - here they are.. these are pretty serious. We've included the definitions (just in case).
1. sui generis - being the only example of its kind; unique
2. solipsistic - the adjective of "solipsism": the theory that the self is the only thing that can be known and verified
3. louche - of questionable taste or morality; decadent
4. laconic - using or marked by the use of few words; terse or concise
5. saturnine - having or marked by a tendency to be bitter or sardonic

Cheesh. Well you won't be seeing too many of those words in Shiny Shiny phone reviews, though quite a few USB gadgets could surely be called "louche" in that they are often of questionable taste.

(and lapidary, btw, means "gem-like", that's nice isn't it?)

[via the Nieman Journalism Lab]

I knew the iPad would change men's fashion irrecoverably. The portable 10" screen tablet computer is either going to have men toting man-bags or it will do something very strange to men's pockets. Today I saw a vision of one of those possible futures, it's above. Some beautiful photoshop work from ohno!doom! has brought us the big ass pocket jeans - trousers capable of carrying an iPad. I won't say it's stylish, I'll just say that it would definitely carry it. I'll also add: don't sit down with that expensive machine on the wrong side of your buttocks.

The other alternative is a kangaroo style pouch at the front of a hoodie or shirt that the Pad could just nestle in. I'll post that as soon as I find a picture.

On other matters: nice model right? They should do some glamour shots of macboys posing with iPads. I'd buy the calendar..

Sadly the design collective behind ohmy!doom! have no plans to make these beauties, but if anyone does, let us know. They have our full support.

[via ohno!doom!]

Do you have three minutes that you'd like to spend idling on the internet doing something a bit pointless? Ever wondered what piece of furniture you'd be if you were a piece of furniture?

Finally someone has put the urge to time-waste together with the urge to imagine oneself as a piece of Swedish furniture and created: the Swedish Furniture Name Generator, decked out in Ikea's blue and gold.

It seems a bit unsure as to whether Anna is a small commode or a table. Type your name in, it comes up with a Swedification of it and a line drawing of a piece of minimalist pine furniture. Great. Now, you know and we can go back to work.

[via Blogadilla]

The spectacle industry has taken to augmented reality like a duck to water. They have cottoned to the fact that a little AR camera-work helps replicate the vital stage of letting people try on glasses.

Silhouette, the makers of rimless spectacles have developed a web page and an iPhone app Silhouette Virtual Mirror that lets you test out spectacles on yourself without having to go into the shop and try them on. The web thing is here, and the free app is called Silhouette Virtual Mirror. For a bit I thought that would actually turn the phone into a mirror, which I would like, but no: it just uses a picture of you and superimposes a pair of spectacles on it.

In a similar but less augmented way, The Specsavers I went to had a couple of these live in the shop and it was a treat. A screen takes up to four pictures of you, in theory with different pairs of glasses on, and you can the spectacles by putting the photos side by side.

The other customers when I was in the shop were all a bit too embarrassed to use them properly, but I loved it. Could have spent hours doing that. Anyway, marks to Specsavers for using tech in a useful engaging way...

On other weird cosmetic uses for AR, see this video below of some Japanese software which graphically applies make-up to your face through a webcam.

Mental.

[via TechDigest]