Evri is a site currently in beta that uses news sources on the web to chart the popularity of different subjects in the categories of People, Places and Things. Clicking on the individual circles in the flow chart opens up a list of news articles in which they appear. Using Evri.com is certainly one way to keep up to date on whats hot and what's not.

Making a point-by-point comparison chart is a pain in the butt. It requires fiddling with spreadsheets, formatting lots of individuals cells and hoping the results are easy to read. Tablefy takes all the mess out of comparing things. Just put in your data and it'll do the rest. You can even embed pictures and YouTube videos with little fuss.

The example charts look sharp and professional, and there are some neat little auto-formatting quirks that save you time. If you're doing a comparison that uses a lot of "yes" and "no" -- a feature comparison between two apps, for example -- Tablefy will automatically color the yes and no cells for you, making them easier to distinguish. Although the charts are made to be embedded on your own site, there are lots of examples to browse and vote on at the Tablefy site.

[via Webware]

Have you ever had the need to quickly and dynamically generate charts for a web based application? Google can help.

The new Google Chart API is a tool that one can use to create charts and graphs that can be embedded in websites. Basically, you type a few commands into a URL string and Google will spit out a PNG image with a line chart, bar chart, pie chart, venn diagram, or scatter plot. You can customize colors, points, and sizes. The developers guide walks through everything you might want to accomplish with the API.

When complete, copy the charts URL, and wrap a set of images tags around it to embed it into websites.

For example, the chart you see on the right was generated by entering this URL in a browser.

If you are thinking about doing more than 50,000 queries per day, you might have issues, that's the limit Google places on users per day. Right click on our image in this post, and take a peek at the URL, thats the guts of the image.

Instacalc just blows my mind. It's such a simple idea, brilliantly executed: It's sort of like a Web 2.0 mini-Excel, allowing you to quickly create a calculator for anything--body mass, loan repayment, YouTube valuation--with simple or complex calculations, and then share them with your friends, colleagues, or the world. It knows lots of mathematical operations and functions, understands things like "3 billion" or "8 kbps," and even does some basic programming-like operations.

Unlike a full-fledged spreadsheet, Instacalc just has rows, and in each row you can enter a number or bit of math, and the result will be shown at the end of the row as you type. You can refer to values from other rows by their row number (e.g. 5 + R1), or you can give a row a name by putting "rowname =" before it and then refer to it by name (5 + rowname). You can click on the result at the end of a row to hide the row and show only the result, and you can put "//" before a row to make it into a comment, i.e. a text label that doesn't do anything but give information to whoever's using your Instacalc. If you've ever done any programming, all of this is probably sounding pretty familiar, but even if you haven't Instacalc is easy to use. On top of all the various operations, you can also quickly create bar, pie, and line charts, like this country population chart.

But wait, it gets better. Like any good Web 2.0 service, Instacalc lets you embed your calculator in any web page with a snippet of HTML.

Obviously, I'm very impressed by Instacalc and am shuffling it straight into my bookmarks. Head over there and check out some of the sample calculators to quickly get an idea of what it's capable of. Once you've played around a bit, post links to your Instacalcs in the comments.

Microsoft has unveiled a Vista upgrade matrix, detailing which present versions of Windows are eligible for upgrading to one of the four relevant versions of Vista (Starter and Enterprise are targeted for specific markets and therefore not included in this matrix). To make matters a bit complicated, however, some editions (such as XP Pro or Win2K) are only eligible to upgrade to a "corresponding or better" version of Vista, i.e. - Business or Ultimate. As icing on the cake, some ugprades will require a fresh wipe and install, while others can be upgraded 'in-place', retaining your applications and settings.

To be clear, however: all present versions of Windows listed in this chart are eligible to purchase upgrade editions of Windows Vista. Previous versions, such as Win98 and ME, will have to purchase a full edition of Vista.

Earlier this week Yahoo! announced changes that would roll out soon to upgrade aspects of the Yahoo! Finance property. One of these changes, and probably the most significant for daily users, is the completely overhauled Stock Charts.

When Google rolled out Google Finance property, most of the hubbub around their offering was the dynamic charts. These hadn't been seen before anywhere and had a lot of "kewl" factor in them. Even without the kewl charts, Yahoo! continued to be the most comprehensive and most visited financial resource on the web. And now, Y! is rolling out their version of dynamic stock charts with lots of "kewl" factor. Read on for an overview of the new features and my thoughts.

Yahoo! announced in a press release that many long-awaited upgrades were soon to appear on Yahoo! Finance, albeit some only in beta form.

Stock Charts - Google showed us that they could beat Yahoo! to the punch with their Ajaxy charting tools. Unfortunately for Google, the financial users are a pragmatic bunch and need more than the "kewl" factor to make them switch as indicated by Yahoo! continuing to hold the financial users' interest. According to this recent announcement, Y! Finance users will soon be enjoying new kewl dynamic charting tools which take advantage of Flash and DHTML . It pays to be patient, eh?

Message boards - Yahoo! has been upgrading its message boards throughout its many sites for many months now. Yahoo! Finance has seen some of these changes already. Easier search, threaded views and now a rating system to quickly locate quality contributors to the conversation.

Y! Finance Badge - Y! Finance badges for your website have been out in beta for a while now but according to this announcement are out of beta and available for general consumption.

Y! Finance Videos - Y! has made huge advances recently in its ability to serve video regardless of where it is hosted. This is spreading to various Y! sites including Y! Finance. Today's announcement points out that video from several news sources are being made available via the Y! Finance site.

The new stock charts are being evasive. Hopefully we will see them in action soon even if only on a beta version of the Y! Finance site.

UPDATE: The new chart tools are being rolled out to small percentage of users for now. This is much as the ! home page revision was revealed to only a few users for their feedback before opening it up to all Y! home page visitors. More Y! Finance users can expect to see the new chart tools as time goes by.