Swivel
Wednesday, December 6th, 2006 | Nick Bugajski
Swivel, a new data analysis website, has launched today. The founders like to refer to the site as YouTube for Data. The aim of the site is to get people to upload and analyze data on the site and then share and distribute the results of that analysis in the form of linked graphs, kind of like the embedded video players of the aforementioned YouTube.
I worry that this site is trying to hard to be everything to everyone. Covering all types of data and trying to do something intelligent with them seems to me to make it unlikely that the site will be an authority on any data set. Also of concern is the highly likely possibility of users producing all kinds of bad graphs that mean nothing, but are treated as evidence of something or other. Those that enjoy the kind of nonsense graphics that populate the likes of Time magazine, will probably love this site for that very reason.
What is exciting to me, is the possibility of this site becoming a central repository of quality metadata. The kinds of datasets that are most useful as additions to other datasets. Things like lists of holidays or stock market closing days. If these types of datasets find a home on Swivel, perhaps they can get the ongoing updates, corrections and verifications that would make them very useful to the community.
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