The EagerEyes Labs' mission is to provide tools to gain insight into relevant data to everybody. As part of that, the plan has always been to release the source code. The first piece of code is now published, and more is coming.

This website just got a facelift and a few new features. I transitioned it to Drupal 6, and in the process redid the theme from scratch. While the changes are not huge, it does look a bit more modern. There are also a few new features to facilitate commenting and discussion.

I have moved the photos from Vis conferences etc. that I used to host here to a collection on Flickr. The intention is to make them easier to find, since I expect more people to look for pictures of events on Flickr than using Google. The collection of images and events covered has been expanded, and all the images have been "remastered", and are now larger and prettier. I will still announce new photos here when I post them on Flickr.

I used the Presidential Demographics chart in my talk at the Impact of Social Data Visualization panel at InfoVis 2007, and got some interesting responses to that. There is some interest in printing this out, so I have made a new version of the chart that is now also available as a PDF. Stephen Few used Joseph Berk's term "interocular traumatic impact" – a visualization that hits you between the eyes – to describe it. And this is exactly what visualization can do extremely effectively: visual communication, and not just of data.

This summer has been a busy one for me and a rather inactive one for EagerEyes. But it is almost over now, and even though things are not getting quieter (quite the opposite with the semester starting), this site will see regular updates (at least once a week) again.

After relentless spamming over the last few weeks (hundred spam comments per day), the site has received a major overhaul under the hood. You should not see much of a difference, but life will be considerably easier for me. I am still experimenting with different CAPTCHAs, which work to varying degrees. If you have trouble submitting comments, please do not hesitate to use the contact form and describe what you are doing and what response you are getting.

The ZIPScribble Maps of the US obviously hit a nerve, with over 55,000 unique visitors in about two weeks, and more than 70 comments. There was also some criticism, especially regarding some slight problems with coloring the states, and that some of the dividing lines were not, in fact, state lines (and that it was not easy to compare them to state lines). For reasons of convenience, I had also left out Alaska and Hawaii, and there were requests for similar maps for more countries. The US maps have just been updated to solve almost all of the above problems (except for AK and HI, which are included in separate maps for now), and ZIPScribbles for several other countries will be published in the next few days. An interactive version is also in the works.