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Introducing the StatSheet Chart Builder BETA May 05, 2008 One of the things that makes StatSheet unique is my usage of flash-based charts to show stats, comparisons, and stat relationships. To date, I've created the charts I thought people would be interested in. Starting today, any StatSheet user can create a chart using data in the StatSheet database! I've had this idea for a while, but I've been inspired recently by Swivel and Many Eyes, both of which have rich environments to visualize data. The key drawback is they require that you BYOD (bring your own data). Since StatSheet has one of the most in depth databases on the net for college basketball (and growing to more sports soon), I figured why not offer similar capabilities, but let people use data in my database. Currently I'll calling the Chart Builder BETA quality. That means it isn't complete. In fact, you can't save charts yet which will be a key feature in the future. However, you can start building charts to see what is possible. I'd appreciate any and all feedback! I have lots of ideas to enhance the Chart Builder over time, but I'd love to hear what people think. Posted by Robbie | Permalink StatSheet wins the StrikeIron Mashup Madness Grand Prize!! May 02, 2008 I submitted two entries to the StrikeIron Mashup Madness Contest in March. Rankings in Motion won the overall Grand Prize and Conference Tournament Central received Honorable Mention. Conf Tourney Central was three times more work than Rankings in Motion, but not quite as flashy. I used the TSN College Basketball Web Service in conjunction with other web services to create the two mashups. It was fun to compete and my hats off to StrikeIron for holding the contest. I hope they continue to enhance their list of sports-related web services in the future. Posted by Robbie | Permalink StatSheet is moving up the charts! April 11, 2008 StatSheet is currently #2 if you search on college basketball stats and #2 for college basketball statistics. This is quite an accomplishment considering the site has been up since only November. I'm ahead of such big names as cbssports.com, foxsports.com, and kenpom.com. Search engine rankings tend to be fairly fluid, so I can't promise it will stay like this in the future, but at least my SEO efforts have paid off to date! Posted by Robbie | Permalink StatSheet Photo Gallery April 11, 2008 Each AP news story that I download has zero or more photos associated with it. I do some additional processing on each photo to determine the related teams, players, and coaches. I've taken those photos and created a Photo Gallery that lets you view photos by certain actions (dunks, shooting, driving to the basket, fouling, etc.) You can also view all the photos associated with a particular team (here is UNC). I've got more stuff planned in this area so stay tuned. Posted by Robbie | Permalink First HeatMap for StatSheet.com April 10, 2008 I've been a fan of Heatmaps since I saw my former publisher use them for trend analysis of the computer book industry. One form of heatmap that can come in very handy at StatSheet is the geographical heatmap. I can think of many uses for it, but the big problem is that there aren't any good web-based widgets for displaying heatmaps. The first one I've found is from Google. The problem with Google Gadgets is they are currently set up to work with Google Docs like Google Spreadsheets not databases. But I've been able to work around that little detail to produce my first Heatmap on the High School Recruiting page. With it, I show the distribution of the top recruits across the United States. Now there are some limitations with Google's Heatmap. First, you can't hover over a state to see the number of recruits--you have to guess by the intensity of the color (or look at the report). Second, it would be nice if you could click on a particular state to go to a page about that state (see here). Ok, I'll stop nitpicking for now. Posted by Robbie | Permalink Today is Jeff Crume day at StatSheet.com! April 04, 2008 I'm unveiling the new High School Basketball section at StatSheet.com today. You can find a bunch of info on the top high school recruits since 1998 and even the McDonald's All-Americans since 1977 (when McDonald's first started naming All-Americans). I've tried to put the usual StatSheet.com flair on the data by providing stuff you can't find anywhere else (like Class Stats, Distance to College, Best College Class, or the Top Recruits by State, College, and Conference). The reason today is Jeff Crume day is because Jeff was nice enough to let me use his RSCI rankings on StatSheet.com. Jeff has been collecting various High School basketball hoops experts player rankings since 1998 and using it to compute a RSCI rank for players. Big thanks Jeff! In addition to the HS section, you can now find high school player rankings in the following locations:
Posted by Robbie | Permalink A closer look at the Final Four March 30, 2008 The Comparison features of StatSheet.com have been pretty popular so I've updated the home page to show a stat comparison of the Final Four teams. I've also included links to player comparisons for the the big men, point guards, etc. The last 3 games should be exciting! Posted by Robbie | Permalink NCAA Tourney Selection Time! March 13, 2008 I've had a few requests for tools to aid people with their mock NCAA tournament selection committees (yes there is such a thing). I've created three tools:
Posted by Robbie | Permalink Is StatSheet a "Killer Startup"? March 12, 2008 StatSheet.com showed up on eHub and Killer Startups the other day. For kicks, vote me up on KillerStartups if you are a fan of StatSheet:
Posted by Robbie | Permalink A couple of tweaks March 09, 2008 I've updated the front page a bit. It now has links to all the conference tourneys that are in progress or upcoming. Just about every conference tournament has seeding information now. I've added a "news" section for each tournament page so you'll have access to all the preview and recap articles in one spot. Posted by Robbie | Permalink |
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