knov

Hindsight is 20/20. It’s a shame its so far-sighted…or near-sighted…at the current time. It’s shocking to look back and see what has happened in a year. As I spent time filling out my self-review, I was able to look back at the projects I had worked on since joining the USA TODAY staff last February… and I realized I had not marked links to most of them…so here they are:

• The Grunion: A lost sub found by new family
• Primary Exit Polls
• Yankee Stadium Tribute
• NFL Draft 2008
• NFL Draft History: Finding the talent
• Life Summer Media Preview: Movies | Music | Books | TV
• Olympics: Ever Wonder…
• Olympics: Sights & Sounds Interface/Player (template)
• Campaign Finance Tracker
• Mr. October
• College athletes and their majors
• Bowl Calendar

The interesting thing is that more recently, I have not been focused on projects. I have been spending a lot of time working on templates, components and tools. I guess I should make that a post all it’s own in the near future…

USA Today’s Campaign Finance Tracker is alive and kicking.

Aside from being perhaps a bit too engrossing, it takes campaign finance one step further by allowing you to filter down individual donations by location, amount, date, and business sector.

It’s obviously no shocker that in Obama’s home state of Illinois contributions to his campaign were more than three times those to McCain’s. Likewise in McCain’s home state of Arizona, McCain’s contributions were about three times Obama’s. The difference is that McCain’s home state contributions (excluding those under $200) was $5,464,816 compared to Obama’s home state contributions of $18,631,571. WOW!

I think the bigger part of the story is the data that is missing…not by any fault of the reporting team…but due to the fact that any contribution of under $200 is not recorded. Wow…
Obama: $189M
McCain: $51M

There are lots of other unspokens here…look how much both candidates have received via the max contribution of $2300.

Now that you have looked at all of this…check out the party view to see how lopsided it is from the candidate view. Not a real shocker, but all the same…and then the Independent Groups…Big names and big power for those guys – don’t you wonder where your money goes?

In an effort to answer user’s questions about various olympic sports and get the reporting started on the olympics with the trials…we created a very nice Papervision3D Carousel to hold some really stellar explanatory graphics.

Unfortunately, this also helped us realize that PV3D is nowhere near ready for the mainstream. It still runs extremely slow on the processor – except on the killer MacBook Pros that the Design department is working on. But, that is not our target audience…

Alternative solutions? No carousel?

Leaves me questioning how to push the envelope with so many restrictions…

Leave it to MediaStorm to put together an all-out package that really impresses me. Not only does this one put it all in one place, but it also does a terrific job of presenting the information.

The timeline is fantastic. And it lets you dig into parts of the story. Albeit, when I first looked at it, I wasn’t sure which way to read (left-right or top-bottom), but I figured it out.

On top of that, under the maps there is so much data – but put into charts that give it context. Terrific! Now, let’s add some interactivity to those charts!!!

Check it out: http://iraq.reuters.com/

In conjunction with the “Grunion Family,” I worked with a wonderful team to produce a memorial to the 70 crew members of a U.S. submarine that sank 65 years ago off the coast of Alaska:
Lost crew discovers a family