Google Visualisation Gadgets – Cool

I discovered the world of visualisation gadgets through this excellent blog: http://digitalurban.blogspot.com/

They’re things that can basically turn a table full of boring data into interactive gadgets that you can publish and share as you like.

I thought it looked easy. So I tried it out.

I grabbed some European Internet Population data from here. Copied and pasted it into Google Docs (via an Excel html import). Then added a column of country codes from here.

Then just clicked insert gadget and bosh…

It took about 15 minutes total to create something mildly useful. I’ve probably not picked the best information to display in this way – and the data is incomplete. But I was impressed with how simple it was.

There’s lots more types of gadgets – timelines, charts, and all sorts…

You can read documentation of the heatmap gadget here.
The data source is here.