Roll your own Rosling

Hans Rosling's TED talks are the stuff of legend for we data animators - his original talk, now labelled "Hans Rosling shows the best stats you're ever seen", simply stunned us when we first saw it... and then prompted us to call Visokio and persuade them to build animation features into Omniscope.

Four years ago, Rosling sold the software that powers his incredible presentations to Google - and the result was the Google Public Data Explorer. Now Google has opened up the Public Data Explorer so that you can explore your own datasets with ease... although to do so, you need to organise your data in Google's new XML dialect, the Public Data Set Language ("PDSL") - so it's one for you Data Pioneers only, at this stage.

Here at Atheon Analytics, having a pioneering nature, we are starting to experiment with PDSL and will post again when we have some noteworthy results... early work suggests that the Public Data Explorer remains best-suited to time-series data sets, but we have a few ideas which may work equally well. In the meantime, we are keen to hear from anyone with positive results... do let us know.