Charted – A new way to share data | Hacker News Reader

Charted – A new way to share data

medium.com

97 pointssmurfpandey12 comments

I used to work at Medium on the product science team before this tool was created. I didn't work on it myself, although I can appreciate how well it works in practice. The simplicity-of-use of this tool, both as a data provider and as a visualization consumer, is incredible.

I can imagine some HN readers thinking they want more detailed graph control, but the few options + the defaults on this tool cover a surprising range of use cases. I think you have to try it on your own data to appreciate the subtle decisions that went into the design.

This is a neat idea, but I think it's a bit too minimal. What I like about it is it tries to just Do The Right Thing for your chart setup. Unfortunately, a lot of that assumes that the data is already prepared in The Right Way. Therein lies the crux.

Playing around with it briefly, it looks like your data already needs to be filtered to only the columns you want displayed and presumably pre-aggregated. The question is should your tool help you do that. That's where BI comes in, but the tradeoff is you lose the simplicity with all the BI tools out there (eg can you explain a join to your marketing manager? How about the difference between a measure and dimension?)

At DataHero.com we're building the best of both worlds -- both a tool that can automatically do The Right Thing in terms of your chart setup, but also have enough intelligence under the hood to prepare it The Right Way without having any technical background. BI and visualization are still a technical person's playground... once a tool can automatically understand what's in your data AND automatically understand the best way of putting it all together, that's how you make "Data" accessible to the larger market.

This is a great tool in making Data as accessible as possible, but it's missing the step on going from the raw data to the prepared data (and making it easy/intelligent/automatic enough that you don't need to understand a join to do it).

So is this supposed to be an easy way for people to write blog posts that have data attached to them?

Hi, I'm on the team at Medium that launched Charted today. No, Charted wasn't built to be used in blog posts. It was built as an internal tool to, among other things, share simple data query results and create ad-hoc dashboards (as part of the general data analysis our Product Science team does).

considering what medium is - yes precisely.

It's beautiful. Really well done in terms of UI/UX. I did find a minor bug however, in the notes section newlines are completely discarded upon refreshing or sharing the link.

Anyways I thought I'd add a CSV file I had generated with Ebola outbreak data from the WHO where you can see a decline in the rate of infection and mortality of the virus.

http://www.charted.co/?%7B%22dataUrl%22%3A%22https%3A%2F%2Fr...

interesting chart - just as an aside, im getting a 'phishing warning' on that link from Chrome.

http://www.datacopia.com/ does something similar - but goes a fair bit further - actually trying to work out what's in your data and the best way to display it.

I would hesitate to say "A new way to share data". I would describe it as "reducing the barrier to entry for data visualization to copy and paste".

I like it. Didn't work on the first time I tried, but thats fine, it is kind of a weird data set (some categorical data).

Google used to have this simple gviz charting device that would take data in urls and return pngs of charts.

I'm not sure about the "gviz charting device" but they still have the chart service up. Here's an example:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=bvs&chs=500x250&chco=...

How does this compare to Quartz's Chartbuilder? I just started using that for quick graphing.

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