I'm sure Tufte would be all for this. Sometimes, we have so much data that it is just overwhelming. Generally, we do statistical analysis on data to get the underlying story behind it. But what about visualizing it. ManyEyes is a data visualization tool built by Martin Wattenberg at IBM that does just that. (Full disclaimer, I do know the creator.) It allows anyone to upload a dataset and use any number of their visualization tools to view the data. It is amazing how looking at data from a different angle can result in new discoveries.

One thing that was not documented fully at Google for integrating Google Earth into Google Map is that the function, getEarthInstance, is only available in the newest version of the Map API. I could not find exactly which version so the best way is to use v=2.x like in "http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&v=2.x&key=yourkey" instead of specifying an exact version. Have fun with this new feature.

Google just added a new Earth plugin feature to Google Maps.  Now we can have all the functionalities of Earth as one of the selections buttons on Maps just like Satellite view.  This is a very exciting new development.

Google has made life easier again for website owners by improving their Google Analytics. The new beta was just released recently and it has a lot of very important information for understanding how people get to the site and navigate through the content. The new features added allow you to target a page on your site to see what keywords, internet ads, or referral site landed the visitor there. Then you can see where the visitors go from there by drilling down through different possible pages and ending on a third page. With this valuable information and another Google tool for optimizing your site page by testing different versions of the same page, you can start to systematically improve your site content to what your visitors are actually looking for while surfing through your pages.

As developers, we always try to write code once and reuse through various techniques of organizing, packaging, and distributing our code. Dapper has taken this philosophy to reusing content. This basically allows information to be published on one website and be used for all other websites that find the information useful in enhancing its services to its visitors.

This certainly is a great example of Web 2.0.