Thanks for making the trip over here to post your comments.

I think it would be great to know the use case that the requesting user had in mind. I will bet you that there is a better alternative. And if there is a better alternative, then shouldn’t we suggest it to them? Isn’t that “The Power to Know”?

If there isn’t a better alternative, then I will buy a copy of your upcoming book, “SAS ODS Graphics Designer: An Interactive Graph Builder” and literally eat a page from it. Actually, I’ll probably buy it in any case :>

But I assume the requesting users has a valid reason to do what they want, and I am investigating avenues to acheive such a result.. After all, you can do almost anything with Annotate anyway. Note: We also provide pie charts and dot plots.

It is good, however, that John has stepped forward with a discussion of not how, but if such a plot should be used.

The point I was trying to get across related to Sanjay’s desire to use an appropriate chart for data with large differences in values. For that, a bar chart typically isn’t appropriate, and a dot plot may be a better alternative.

I’ll stick to my guns on NEVER using a log axis on a bar chart. The reason this should be a hard and fast rule is because, good info visualizers don’t present graphs that break a rule that most of us learned in 2nd grade. The bar chart is so effective because humans are really good at comparing the heights of the bars. As long as the difference in the bar heights is kept absolute (2x height difference is 2x value difference), then no one gets hurt. Once you break that relationship between bar height and bar value, then you really ought to move onto another chart type, or a table. Explaining graphs is kind of like explaining jokes, if you have to do it, it’s probably pretty bad.

Logging the scale creates the kind of dissonance that those orange freight trucks with the yellow logo create.

While it may be great for “Yellow” to turn our expectations upside down, it’s probably not something you want to do to your audience when they read your chart.

This data set is not appropriate for a log scale, clearly.
A log scale is designed to compare values that have orders of magnitude of difference. This data does not.

With the right data, and for the right audience, a bar chart with a log scale can be appropriate.

In this case, I also wouldn’t bother with going the dot plot route, although I wouldn’t say it is wrong either.
But this data is perfectly acceptable data for just a simple straightforward bar chart. It would show the differences between the vehicles extremely well, and remain quite simple and clear in a way that any viewer can instantly understand.

From what I’ve read and know about Twitter’s API, there is no way to go back more than 1 week or x number of Tweets using Twitter’s own API. However, I think there are some sites on the web that will let you hop in a time machine and exceed Twitter’s thresholds. One is snapbird.org

To search for a specific subject, say you want to find recent tweets with the word ‘Eagles’ in it, the string would look like this:
http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=%40Eagles

Details about the search api are at: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/using-search

Good luck!

Thanks again!