Starting on Wednesday, March 28, Social Explorer will be served from the Amazon Cloud through Amazon Web Services. We have run extensive testing and expect that most users will not even notice the change. If you experience any access or other issues, please let us know at support@socialexplorer.com immediately.
This move is necessary as we begin to add world wide data and attract world wide users. It will also support our soon-to-launch Social Explorer 2.0.
We say hello to Amazon Web Services, as we improve the way we bring you all of our resources and tools.
See you in the cloud!
This week, Social Explorer unveils 2009 data, enabling subscribers to work with the most currently available demographic information.
The data come from the
American Community Survey (ACS), an extensive annual survey administered by the Census Bureau to a sample of about 3 million households nationwide. Just one week after the Census Bureau released this data, Social Explorer added them to the site for users to explore.
In concert with the decennial Census, Social Explorer’s 2007 estimates, and prior years of the ACS, the newly added 2009 ACS data offer improved ways to explore and describe US demographics. This 2009 data will also be instrumental in seeing the impact of the recession on the US and forecasting upcoming redistricting changes.
Social Explorer has started tweeting! Click here to follow us for all the demographic action on our blog and Facebook Page.
Earlier this month, Social Explorer unveiled 2008 data, enabling subscribers to work with the most currently available demographic information.
The data come from the American Community Survey (ACS), an annual survey administered by the Census Bureau to a sample of about 3 million households nationwide. The results from the 2008 survey were recently released and Social Explorer has them ready for use. In concert with the decennial Census, Social Explorer’s 2006 estimates, and prior years of the ACS, the newly added 2008 ACS data offer improved ways to explore and describe US demographics.
Earlier this month, Social Explorer unveiled new estimates that let subscribers work with Census tract-level data for the year 2006. The new resource enables deeper research for more recent years of data.
Social Explorer constructed this dataset using data from both the published and public use micro-sample of the 2005-2007 American Community Survey (ACS), and geographic boundaries from the 2000 Census. Social Explorer allocated six-year changes at the so-called PUMA level (areas of at least 100,000 people) to the tracts based upon their characteristics in 2000. In this way, Social Explorer estimates are consistent with those produced by the ACS.
This additional resource brings usability and local-area specificity to the most currently available data. Subscribers can access the 2006 Census estimates through the maps and the reports tabs.
Click here to find out more about subscribing for access to the new estimates and all of Social Explorer’s tools and resources.
Last week we put up the newly redesigned Social Explorer website. We have have improved the look and feel, navigation and added a new section called ‘Help’ which contains documents and examples on how to use Social Explorer. The help section was written and illustrated by Zanna Hendrey.
We hope you enjoy the new site!
We have started a mailing list for Social Explorer!
Our plan is to send out a simple news-letter email to our mailing list subscribers four to six times a year. This way we can keep you informed about new developments and data releases at Social Explorer, but not overwhelm your inbox. We hope you join.
Sign up here!
We have added a new feature to export Social Explorer slide shows to Microsoft PowerPoint.
Here is how it’s done:
Fist, you must be logged in either directly or by IP range.
1. click File->New Slide show
2. add a few slides
3. click File->Export to PowerPoint
4. set presentation title then click OK
5. wait while our system produces the slide show.
fig 1. Creating and exporting a slide show to PowerPoint.
fig 2. Enter presentation title and click OK to export.
fig 3. Save or Open the PowerPoint presentation.
Now that you have your presentation in PowerPoint, you can set slide transition property to move to next slide every x seconds. In fig. 4, I set the presentation to move to next slide every second, thereby animating the slide show. This works really well when you have maps over time. For example, you can show how U.S. grew from 1790 to 2000.
fig 4. Set Advance slide property to all slides in the presentation. This will automatically move to next slide every x seconds when the presentation is running.
Sample Presentation: Download 1790-2000 Population Density
Thanks to the good folks at the Opera Software company, we now support Opera Browser version 8 and 9. Opera used to report itself as MSIE in the navigator.appName() javascript function prior to release 9, so when they switched to identifying themselves as Opera, our scripts were a bit off.
Social Explorer now supports Opera version 8 & 9!
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