Calling all Pinsters! I'm looking for anyone willing to contribute their very useful data, currently floating around the Pin in miscellaneous forms. I'm playing with some ideas for prettifying it. You would still "own" the data and get to update it whenever you want, according to your own schedule.
To kick the tyres of it, I started with metalmike's PPR numbers from
here. (h/t to metalmike for the collaboration so far). The object was to capture the monthly and quarterly numbers, year-on-year changes, and so on, all in one compact chart instead of the
"wall of text".
Here is the result of the initial tyre-kicking: note
the numbers are not real (yet). Click on the screenshot below to go to the real interactive version in a new window/tab. I need to discuss further with metalmike before this is finalised.

The charts are in beautifully resizable SVG -- no more fugly distorted bitmaps. The underlying technology is the wondrous
D3.js library. The actual data is in simple csv or tsv form like this (I was hoping it could also be edited in Google sheets, but this hasn't worked out [yet]):
Code:
Xlabel,2013,2014,2015,2016
Jan, 400, 603, 1254, 125
Feb, 400, 603, 1254, 125
Mar, 1100, 1200, 1300, 0
Apr, 1255, 1807, 1042, 0
May, 1161, 1149, 1035, 0
Jun, 1272, 2277, 1764, 0
Jul, 1255, 1807, 1042, 0
Aug, 1161, 1149, 1035, 0
Sep, 1272, 2277, 1764, 0
Oct, 1255, 1807, 1042, 0
Nov, 1161, 1149, 1035, 0
Dec, 1272, 2277, 1764, 0
Volunteer data contributors would be able to keep the data updated without having to worry about how the chart is done, while hard-core hackers can contribute their hand-coded charts.
Here's the code for the bar chart above. Bar charts are only the beginning. D3 allows data to be attached to any SVG images. Here's one borrowed from Wikimedia Commons and tidied up with Inkscape:

Once in the right form it's a (relatively) simple matter to tag the counties with data, and create heat maps,
chloropleths etc. I'm hoping to do this with my own price/sq.ft. data.
Ideally we could keep some kind of structured list of pretty chart links, highlighting which ones had been updated recently. Anyone interested in prettifying their existing data or charts? Doesn't matter whether you are planning to hack it yourself, or just contribute data and let someone else design the visuals. Reply here or PM me.