Google have released some new toys: visualizations AKA gadgets.

This is what we’ve been waiting for without quite knowing what we were waiting for.

If you have some data in a Google spreadsheet, or another application that implements the API (are there any?) then you can hook it up to a visualization. See the gallery.

This was not available when I looked at graphing just a couple of months ago, although maybe I could have done something with Google spreadsheet charts.

I thought I’d see how easy it would be to build a new web service. Imagine if I wanted to add a ‘rate this post’ function to my blog. (I don’t, but I might want something along those lines for document collaboration. I’ve talked before about the potential for a dashboard for documents.)

So, I went to Google and made a blank spreadsheet. From there I was able to make a form (via Share) with a simple multiple choice where you can rate this post 1,2,3,4 or 5. I grabbed the form and pasted saved it, and embedded in this post. Once I worked out where the form values were being saved it was simple to add a cell that calculated an average rating. Not worrying about rounding or precision or niceties like that at this stage.

So here’s the form, in this table:

On the right is a simple gauge-style visualization, which shows the average rating from 1 to 5. I have rated the post pretty highly to start off with, so if you’d like to see the needle move you’d better vote several times with low numbers. I won’t be offended. Note that it seems to cache results so you won’t get a new view every time you refresh.

Ok, so this instance is a trivial toy, but it opens up a whole lot of new possibilities. Can’t wait to see what Jim Downing does; “I want to play”, says he via del.icio.us. There’s great potential here not just to make visualizations that plug into Google Spreadsheets, but to use the same APIs and/or general approach to do the same for research repositories. The repository community needs to respond quickly to this, lest important research data ends up being hosted in personal Google accounts outside of any preservation regime.

We’re doing a demo tomorrow with a mockup of an assignment submission / marking system using the same technology. Faculty, do not try this at home.

Last post here was another complaint about Google Docs and its terrible OpenDocument Format support. I’ve been very sick for the last little while and it turns out purely by coincidence that the next post I feel strong enough to write is another complaint about Google Docs. I promise I’ll complain about something else next, and then maybe say something nice when I’m feeling particularly strong.

Via OUseful Info I found out about how Google Docs can be used as a blog editor, where the author says:

I wanted to test it out, so this morning I tried pulling in the outline of a presentation I will be doing with Jerry and Andy at ACCS this Friday in order to see how clean it is — let me tell you something, it is very clean!

http://bavatuesdays.com/publishing-google-docs-to-your-blog/

It did indeed seem like Google Docs was producing clean code in the examples cited so I went to check it out. Here’s what I found:

1. There’s no ATOM Publishing Protocol (APP) support. This is a big disappointment. To publish to WordPress you have to use the antiquated Movable Type API.

2. Google Docs was still not producing good clean HTML for me, either in the editing interface or when the document was pushed to my blog. When I use it I get br tags in between my paragraphs rather than proper p elements. How did those other people get it to output proper paragraphs? I finally figured out that you need to select your paragraphs and apply the Style Normal paragraph. That’s a small amount of progress.

   

3. List nesting is still not correct even when you manage to get nesting to happen (and it’s easy to end up with non-nested lists without meaning to). What I think is happening here is that the examples cited above are on WordPress and it has an HTML cleaner-upper that is fixing Google’s broken HTML.

   So, I’m still disappointed, but I am wondering if we can work out some way to support Google Docs as an editor for ICE by inserting a cleaner-upper somewhere in the toolchain. Google docs has spectacularly good collaboration support. But I think we’d be wanting APP support before we tried that. Maybe it’s time to look in to the Google Docs APIs…