We've got a fantastic guest post today from Tim Graham, a Tableau user from Australia and past winner of one of Flowing Data's visualization contests. Tim brought together several visualizations from Tableau with a diagram from another tool to create an amazing information graphic. The resulting image below groups countries of the world by their most popular brands. It's apparent that countries that are geographically close tend to share similar taste in brands, but there are some really interesting findings as well. The former USSR is more aligned with Asia than Europe in terms of what brands they prefer, while the three most "brand-aware" countries in the word seem to be the United States, Singapore, and... Trinidad and Tobago?

Following Garr Reynolds’ opening keynote is no easy act but Stephen McDaniel, author of Freakalytics, held his own. And, distilling the complex subjects of customer segmentation and lifetime value is not a simple task. Stephen used a few tips from Garr and involved the audience early with a question asking who here is involved with customer segmentation. Surprisingly most all hands went up.

After another awesome lunch, today’s general session was The Value of Visualization by Tableau’s CTO, Pat Hanrahan. Pat is a very engaging speaker, which suits him since he’s also a professor at Stanford University.

He opened with a quick story of how he worked with Larry Page, one of the founder’s of Google. He likened Larry’s passion for search when the industry was young to Tableau’s passion for visualization.

Maybe you've been trying to follow the election crisis in Iran. You probably know that traditional news media have been virtually locked out of the story and that Twitter feeds from Iranian citizens is one way people are staying informed (along with blogs and YouTube). If so, then you'll love this visual analysis from a trio of Tableau customers. Led by Logan Lynn of Interworks, they analyzed Tweets coming out of Iran regarding the election events there.

Logan got curious about the Tweets coming out of Iran and captured a day's worth of Tweets. He then used Tableau to visualize the data.

Later, Michael Cristiani of MIG and Joe Mako helped by crowd-sourcing additional visualization of the data. Logan added their work to his blog post.

With over 2.5 million jobs lost in the past four months, it is an employer's market. I myself have a number of friends looking for work, a search no doubt made more difficult by the following fact: According to the 50,000 respondents of the General Social Survey, we young people are a self-admitted group of huge slackers.

It's understandable, however, that we have little time left for work, as apparently we spend all our time having sex and watching TV. (More on that later.)

With all the crises occurring around the world right now, you might think God has bigger things on his plate than getting you out of speeding tickets. Today, we will demonstrate otherwise.

The General Social Survey is a National Science Foundation project that asks people all sorts of interesting questions about their social attitudes, family structure, sex lives, and more. We had a good time visualizing the sex data last week, but for today we'll stick to the much more socially acceptable topic of religion (and traffic tickets).

Did you remember this morning that it's April Fool's Day? Are you wondering who else in the world is playing jokes today and how you compare? Well, wonder no more. We've got the results of a semi-extensive survey about April Fool’s Day to answer your most pressing questions.

First, the basics. Just how immature do you have to be to prank someone? As it turns out, not very. As the visualization below shows, our "jokesters" (people who said yes, they'd be pranking someone this year) rated themselves only slight less mature than people who won't be pranking. But what seems to determine whethere you'll be pranking this year is how much you've pranked in the past. This year's pranksters pranked an average of 5 times in the last 10 years while non-pranksters have only pranked 1 time. I guess once a jokester, always a jokester.

One great thing about working about Tableau is that I get to work with smart people who have years of research experience investigating how to help people see and understand data better. Recently, Jock Mackinlay, Tableau’s Director of Visual Analysis and one of the world’s most expert information visualization scientists, and I had a chance to spend some “think time” together. We talked about a recent article he wrote on the topic of collaborative visualization.

By way of background, the article Jock wrote was a technical perspective titled "Finding and Telling Stories with Data" on an important research paper regarding collaborative visualization; the paper itself is titled "Voyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting Asynchronous Collaborative Visualization" (both pieces require website registration before you can access them). Jock's technical perspective and the paper were published in the magazine "The Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery", or the CACM, which is one of premier publications for computer professionals.

Jock Mackinlay, Tableau’s Director of Visual Analysis, just did a podcast for VizThink. Jock knows even more about data visualization than you would expect of someone with the title Director of Visual Analysis.

This week’s chart is from an article “The battle of Smoot-Hawley” in The Economist magazine (December 20 2008 – January 2 2009 issue). The Economist is one of the few magazines I read. And it normally has intelligent graphics. But I couldn’t help myself with this one.