Charting the Old Spice Guys popularity on Twitter

Watch as The Biz Intel Guru fixes a poorly designed WSJ graphic

The analysis of Amazon’s Kindle reviews continues. The Business Intelligence Guru may have uncovered evidence of fake reviews on Amazon.com.

I came across an exciting and novel piece of visualization software this morning and wanted to share it with the group. What’s novel about the software is that it combines some of the most powerful visualization techniques in one package, with all visualizations linked to each other, kind of like what you’d see in jmp, tableau, and panopticon, but with more of an emphasis on the geographical aspect of your data. When you click a point in the scatter plot, the corresponding point(s) light up on the map, bar chart, …

The Business Intelligence Guru has two simple rules to help prevent you from making bad bar charts. First, always start with a zero baseline. Second, never use 3D. Read on and watch as I convert a bar chart on the left into a clear, concise, honest and insightful line chart.

As an info viz junkie I was excited to see McDonalds using incell bar charts on their food wrappers. I’ve attached an image of one off of a cheeseburger wrapper.
As a Stephen Few fan, however, I know that a key ingredient to high quality info viz is simplicity–it’s got to be easy to understand. To that end, what in the world does the dashed vertical line spanning calories through sodium represent? It looks like it’s set to 33%, but why? Is that some magic number in the world of nutrition? Is 33% “crossing the line” for a single item on their menu? There’s ample room for an explanation of the reference line on the wrapper, but none is provided.