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Photo by Trevor Pritchard

Network dynamic temporal visualization – Skye Bender-deMoll’s blog is the perfect example of why I had to find an alternative RSS service when Google Reader shut down. He only posts once every few months, but I’d hate to miss any of them! Here he covers a delicious little R tool that makes visualizing complex networks over time easy.

PressureNet live API – We’re all carrying little networked laboratories in our pockets. You see a photo. I see millions of light-sensor readings at an exact coordinate on the earth’s surface with a time resolution down to the millisecond. The future is combining all these signals into new ways of understanding the world, like this real-time stream of atmospheric measurements.

Inferring the origin locations of tweets – You can guess where a Twitter message came from with a surprising degree of accuracy, just based on the unstructured text of the tweet, and the user’s profile.

What every web developer should know about URL encoding – Nobody gets URL encoding right, not even me! Most of the time your application won’t need to handle the obscurer cases (path parameters anyone?) but it’s good to know the corners you’re cutting.

Global Name Data – Adam Hyland alerted me to the awesome OpenGenderTracking project. Not only does this have data on names from the US and the UK, but it includes the scripts to download them from the source sites. Hurrah for reproducibility! I’ve also just been alerted to a Dutch source of first name popularity data.