If you're reading this blog, chances are very high that you value data, and chances are also high that you appreciate the presentation of data. Going beyond a spreadsheet of rows and columns and creating a visualization is not only pleasing to the eye, but it can also help put meaning and context to the data and help surface important meanings. As practical as rows and columns of numbers are, sometimes a lot more can be divined a lot faster from a simple pie chart. Or a bar graph. Or an animated motion chart :-)

Data visualization is becoming an art and a discipline. There are blogs and books devoted to it. And we're obviously believers in visualizing data, and so is Google. That's why we're giving a shout out to another Google initiative, the Data Viz Challenge.

Google worked with a website called WhatWePayFor.com that shows the entire federal budget for the past several years, and breaks down spend by program, such as Social Security, national defense, transportation, medicare, etc., and how much is spent on each. It also allows you to enter an income amount and shows you how much of your own taxes goes to each program. Great data to make into a visualization.

WhatWePayFor has made their data available via an API to contestants who want to take a crack at visualizing this data, and Google is offering a $5,000 prize to the best visualization, as decided on by a panel of judges, as well as other prizes for cool entries. Deadline for entry is March 27, so get cracking - we want a Google Analytics data head to win this thing. :-)

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team