David Notik

Google continues to be a leader in helping us make use and sense of the increasing amount of government data that's being made public these days. They introduced Public Data Explorer, which lets us query public data and then view it using some powerful, interactive visualizations.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/statistics-for-changing-world-goo...

We can even grab and embed those visualizations.

Population by state, with places I've lived highlighted:

Or drag the slider to see U.S. unemployment rise and fall over the years, then rise dramatically starting in 2008:

Or look at how migration has increased over the past few decades:

Google's given us some very powerful tools here, with a friendly and intuitive interface in classic Google style, even if I can't make sense of all of it right now. When we're discussing some public numbers or statistics, we can query and embed right there, and so you should see this stuff cropping up all across the web. Eventually ,more of this stuff will crop up in Google searches like some of it already does.

Kudos to the Obama administration for really pushing to open up valuable datasets in the United States. There's a lot of good activity in this space now, with conferences and meet ups and more taking place.