Open data is really only as interesting as what we can do with it!

One sweet thing about ScraperWiki is that it enables quick creation of visualizations called ‘views’ from inside the wiki. They’ve got templates that use Google Visualization to help the process along.

I made the following today (from this datasource):

I don’t have the entire data set, but this graph indicates that the recession had a significant negative impact on the creation rate of new businesses in Oregon.

I just started a new scraper job to pull more information about people and the places where the businesses are located. When that job is done, I hope to create a few more fun visualizations with this data.

UPDATE: I’m playing around more, and here’s the embedded version of the graph if you click through (takes a while to load!).
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