Want to Turn Raw Data on a Website or Blog into Something Visually Appealing? Use the Google Chart API

There is a new Google API that might be of interest to some of you who are looking for a means to easily turn numeric data (such as real estate market statistics) on your site into something more visually appealing — the Google Chart API. In addition to venn diagrams and scatter plots, the API supports line, bar, and pie charts. There is no need to even sign up for a Google API key to start using the chart api. Here’s how simple it can be–

Put this into your address bar – http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=s:hW&
chs=250x100&chl=Hello|World

And you’ll get the following chart -

Don’t get me wrong, working with raw data is fun for us techies, but most people love to see visual representations. For instance, a blog post like this one would be more compelling (to me) if it included a bar chart comparing zip codes or neighborhoods. Mashing up Zillow’s quarterly report data into charts seems like it would be do-able for most developers. It’s probably wishful thinking, but perhaps a PHP developer reading this can turn quarterly report data & the Google Chart API into a wordpress plug-in with a browse able user-friendly interface? After all, not many consumers will look at a spreadsheet like this to figure out what is happening in their area.

This is totally unrelated to the Google Chart API, but here is something else that might be of interest to those of you who enjoy visual representations of data.

[via ProgrammableWeb]