In case you missed it, Datalicious created an interactive web-based data visualisation for The Age newspaper to showcase their data on the liveability of Melbourne suburbs. The Age pulled together scores via a survey for each suburb across a range of metrics such as Low Crime, Eating Out, Low Traffic, and Open Space.

The interactive web application was built using Tableau Public and allows you to adjust how important each metric is for you so that an overall score is calculated for each suburb. Have a play and see how the map colours for each suburb change according to your preferences. The top five suburbs are automatically displayed in a list above the map. South Yarra comes out on top if all metrics are considered equal and you have lots of money. The data visualisation also allows you to filter suburbs by median house price.

A few other key insights:

Would love to do the same for Sydney!

Unlike Raoul, there hasn't been much winning on the tables of Vegas so far but, no doubt, my luck's gonna change soon! Where's that ATM again ...

So anyway, the 2011 Tableau customer conference is coming to an end at the Encore Casino, Las Vegas and your faithful Datalicious correspondent has been there to see it all (and I mean ALL of it).

For Tableau, it has been a chance to showcase their new releases of Desktop and Server (both due in January). More on that below. For customers, it has been a great opportunity to meet the 300 strong team (all that was left back in Seattle was an answering machine), and learn about features (old and new) that we can use to pimp our vizzes.

I’m not going to list everything they’ve changed since 6.1 because there's stacks but here are the best bits:

We’ve got our hands on the beta version of 7.0 and look forward to demonstrating the new features with some vizzes over the coming weeks.

Also big thanks to Dirk and Ross, two Tableau Doctors who sorted out some really nasty Tableau table calculations that’ll help us build an interactive media attribution engine.

Over the AFL Grand Final weekend we were pretty busy doing a Twitter data visualisation for an article by the Herald Sun but there's so much more in this data set that we decided to write a follow-up post as well.

Have a look at the below video or the interactive Tableau dashboard behind it, showing volume of Twitter mentions for the different AFL teams over a period of time leading up to the Grand Final. Further down are some screenshots of the Ross Lyon (St Kilda coach) incident, in which he was accused of stabbing his predecessor Mark Harvey in the back for the position of coach at the Freemantle club - the whole story was actively discussed on Twitter as you can see.

The video (and dashboard) present what we call 'Twitter Time', all Tweets broken up into chunks of 400 and then analysed. As the chunks of Tweets (blue lines) are visualised, time will slow down at moments when the volume of Tweets was high, particularly at match dates (green circles) or at the Grand Final (dark green circle). The jersey size is proportional to the number of Tweets mentioning a particular team, and you'll notice that they go gray once they are eliminated from the series. The analysis was run on about 35,000 Tweets provided by Alterian's SM2 social media analytics platform.

Below is the breakdown of the Twitter chatter and mentions of key players, and most importantly coaches, from the time Ross Lyon announced that he was resigning and rumours started about his move to Freemantle (15th and 16th September). All Tweets were analysed for instances of player or coach names. Rumours pop up and die as Twitter volume rises and falls.

Above: Hawthorn vs Sydney & West Coast vs Carlton normal match chatter on Twitter.

Above: rumours of Ross Lyon's move to Freemantle and sacking of Mark Harvey explode on Twitter after Ross Lyon officially resigns. His move to Freemantle is confirmed on the 16th of September.

Above: Neil Craig becomes the topic of conversation as well as it is rumoured he might go to St. Kilda.

Above: AFL fans move on and resume normal match chatter ...

In case you missed my presentation on The Power of Raw Visitor Data at today's SiteCore Dreamcore event in Sydney, check out the below slides.

SiteCore's build-in visitor profiling and segmentation capabilities are awesome but you can do even more advanced data mining and modelling by connecting to the platform's raw web analytics database with tools such as Tableau and SPSS. 

The dataset basically contains all campaign response and visitor behaviour in a readily accessible MS SQL data warehouse which makes it easy to create custom Tableau reports and interactive dashboards as well as run more advanced statistical analysis in SPSS such as regression modelling. In addition, Tableau makes it easy to combine the web analytics data with additional data sources such as your CRM or call center data.

You might also want to have a look at our earlier blog post and video on how to use Tableau to analyse raw SiteCore web analytics data and build interactive dashboards.

When we saw the new Tableau 6.1 dark map background feature and given today is Australian Census day, we though this is ideal to visualise the best nightlife hunting grounds for single men and women in Australia looking for a romance using some of the older Census data from 2006! But before we go into that, let's have a quick look at the sizeable Tableau 6.1 upgrade the company released last week. 

You can check out a full demo of the new Tableau Desktop 6.1 features online but let's have at look at the last Census 2006 data on single men and women in Australia to demonstrate Tableau's new postcode functionality and sexy dark map background.

The basic theory is that there's a severe undersupply of single men for single women, particularly in their 30's. At first glance, this would seem a bit odd given that there's a roughly 50/50 split of men and women at birth. So let's see if this is true ...

At the national level, there are actually more single men than women for ages 20 to 34. And for the 35 to 39 age group there's only around 10,000 more single women than single men. Overall, the man drought doesn't really exist for 30-somethings.

However, the man drought may just be a regional phenomenon.

The below maps highlight the ratio of women to men in between the ages of 30 and 39. Depending on the map and your gender preference, a redder shade indicates a less favourable ratio and a greener shade a more favourable ratio. The size of the location represents the total number of people aged 30 to 39.

Northern NSW appears to have the largest scarcity of single men aged 30-39 (ratio of 1.07), while there's an abundance of men in Regional SA (ratio of 0.85). Although these ratio's aren't particularly high, there's some evidence of the man drought in particular regions of Australia.

Now, here's the best bit. If we look at ratios of single women to single men aged 30 to 39 in particular postcodes, then there are some places in Australia with an obvious scarcity of men. The top 3 places (of notable size) are:

1. 2559, Blairmount, NSW - 2.4 women for every man

2. 4509, Mango Hill/North Lakes, QLD - 1.9
3. 6770, Halls Creek, WA - 1.8 

It seems that there is a man drought, but it just depends on where you live. Similarly, there are places with a severe absence of single women in their 30s too. Here's the top 3:

1. 3008, Docklands, VIC - 0.4 women for every man

Note: There's a fair bit of data behind the dashboards so please be patient when zooming in to your location.