Swivel: Data 2.0 vs Digg Users

June 15th, 2007 • digg, Ruby On Rails

While checking out Ruby on Rails this week I came across a cool website @ swivel.com. I am an econ buff and the ways in which you can compare data are both amazing and easy, enabling me to waste several hours that I should have been working. After perusing the usual high correlation – zero causation I grabbed a fresh copy of Chris Finke’s compiled data on the top 1000 users at Digg, conveniently formatted in CSV for easy upload to swivel. There were some interesting results. I noticed some users I’d never heard of that had dugg quite a few stories and another that had submitted over 5,000 stories only to have 7 hit the front page. The perseverance award goes to rodtrent.

Of course it should come as no surprise that the most popular digg user remains Kevin Rose.

A few other items of interest for digg users can be found here and here. Overall I think swivel is a great tool. My one complaint is that there is no way to make datasets private (and selectively shareable). If you could I would definitely use it for work.