Photo by Brian Fuller

Visualizing Jane Austen – How do the names of key characters recur in Austen's novels? Matthew Hurst has put together some simple but interesting visualizations 

Elasticache – You know how I was just asking for a no-hassle, pay-as-you-go, true database-as-a-service? It isn't persistent, but Amazon's new memcached on-demand is a big step forward. It's a shame you still have to worry about nodes, and I hope it doesn't turn out to have hidden flaws (like Amazon's SimpleDB's reliance on manual sharding) but I'm excited to try it out.

Mumakil – So, I can't actually get this to run, but in theory this should be a great way of doing bulk loads and dumps from Cassandra using Hadoop. I'll also be digging into Brisk over the next few weeks, but I like the idea of something like Mumakil that's laser-focused on data transfer, as a complement to Datastax's more general tools.

Junar – An Argentinean data-marketplace startup. As a data consumer, it's great to see a thousand flowers blossom in this area, and it will be interesting to see how their offerings start to specialize.

Map Tile URL formats – A machine-readable collection describing the format of many different public web services that offer map image tiles (though keep in mind that most of them have lots of conditions attached).