ResearchBuzz

Google is offering a new API to dynamically generate charts in PNG files, and it’s easy to use. So you may come back here in a week and find I’ve randomly generated charts and stuck them in everywhere. The documentation for the chart tool is available at http://code.google.com/apis/chart/ .

You generate the chart by adding things to a URL. You start here:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?

To this you add your parameters, separating them with ampersands. They’re at the URL in the first paragraph, but for a basic chart you only need a few:

cht= — Chart type. You can specify one of several chart types including line, bar, scatter, and pie.

chd= — Chart data. There are three different ways to encode the chart data, depending on what you’re trying to do. This is probably the most complicated part of the chart.

chs= — Chart size, specified by width in pixels by height in pixels. The maximum size of a chart is 300,000 pixels.

If I wanted to generate a 200×200 (pixel) line chart with two sets of data, the URL would look like this:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=lc&chs=200×200&chd=t:3,8,33,1|70,6,4,2

and the image itself would look like this:

Of course, there’s not much information in this chart. You can add a lot of additional items to the URL like chart title, legend, and axis labels (depending on what kind of chart you’re creating, of course.) You can also add colors to the chart, format the text, and so on. (There are a lot of options here. There are so many options I’m kind of jealous when I consider creating charts in Google Spreadsheet.)

Aside from size, the only limit to the chart generator is the number of times you can use it per day — and at the moment that limit is 50,000. (Since no key is required to use the chart, I’m guessing that Google is going by IP address. There’s a very brief FAQ for the service at http://code.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=13605 .

Mailing list ABOUT Drupal FOR Librarians. http://listserv.uic.edu/archives/drupal4lib.html .

Good grief, a database of hookah bars.

Friendster has launched a database of over 180 applications.

Ever wonder where to get those giant gift bows like the ones they put on cars?

Makerere is getting a digital library.

Free, open source program for complex math — Sage.

UNICEF, One Laptop Per Child, and Google teaming up on digital archive.

Heh. Some of Google Books’ pages reveal fingers instead of words.

Merriam-Webster has announced the newest Word of the Year. Last year it was “truthiness” — this year it’s w00t. Yes, with two zeroes. I’m not sure if I believe in numbers as parts of words — perhaps it should be called the String of the Year.

You can get a list of the other Words of the Year at http://www.merriam-webster.com/info/07words.htm . Some of them I found surprising (”facebook”, as a verb), some were rather pedestrian (”apathetic”) and some I just want to go around saying all day long. Sardoodledom! Sardoodledom! Sardoodledom! Sardoodledom!

2007 was not a good year for my geek vocabulary, but there were two words that I thought I would see: “teh” (misspelling of “the” used in an ironic sense) and FTW (”For the Win” — “ISBN/Wikipedia lookup mashed through a Google Spreadsheet and output as an RSS feed FTW!”)

Speaking of * of the year, now’s the time of year where I like to set up one of my temporary information traps. I go to Google News or some other news search and run samples searches like “annual list” “of the year”. If you go to Google News and run that list right now, you’ll find out about the ten worst celebrity ads, the ten best engines, the most gracious autograph givers, and the top ten movies and wines. Or try “the top * of 2007″ and get linked to the top games, gadgets, and incidents of celebrities falling down.

If you want to slant your search somewhat, you can also try the “the worst * of 2007″ list as a query. Replace worst with your adjective of choice — stupidest gets you all of two results.

I’ll generally run these for four weeks just to see what I pick up, and get an idea of what trends are going on in different parts of the world. It’s a very strange crash course in pop culture and industry-specific popularity.