Swivel: more data mashup possibilities than a martini bar

Just about a year ago, the New York Post penned an article about the ultimate compromise (and there have been many!) of the original martini recipe: the bacon martini. Yes, bacon. I like the classic martini as well as an occasional strip of bacon (I grew up eating the breakfast of champions, after all), but even this may be a bit much for me.

Happily, this entry is not about meat cocktails. In the Web 2.0 world, the excess of combining two great things has reached a much more appetizing height with Swivel. The ISIS Program's Tech and New Media Tuesdays brought Swivel Vice President and Chief Data Officer Sara Wood to talk a bit about their website. (There's an API coming soon, as well.) Their mission is to get people engaged and working with data, because it leads to greater involvement with the world around them, whether in politics or just their immediate surroundings. The ability to quickly and easily turn raw data from various sources into graphs (or tag clouds, or maps, or other visualizations) is the tool's greatest strength in my mind, much like what Skitch has done for quick screenshots and basic image editing. If you browse around Swivel for a bit, you'll see data on a huge variety of topics, academic and non-academic alike. Sara demonstrated for us how you can create a mashup of different data sources about anything, like bankruptcy rates and amount of personal savings (her example), or bacon consumption and martini consumption (obviously mine). If I can find such information, I'm totally going to post it there to look for a correlation. :)

A few random things I like about it: the data source(s) are always linked directly so you can determine the data's trustworthiness for yourself. And this wouldn't really be Web 2.0 without the ability for all users to contribute to the existing content; here, you can comment on every page to add further information, have a little debate with other users on what these data mean, and even post a new chart with different data to counter what you see. Finally, Swivel's business model is pretty nifty: if you want the data you upload and analyze to be private, you pay for that privilege. And I can think of many individuals and institutions that will see how useful this tool is and pony up. Otherwise, the information (no SSNs, please!) is available for all the site's users to see and comment.

With that, I say go forth and mash up! I'm going to hunt up a martini before my trip to Boston tomorrow.