The Hannibal Blog is not really a charty blog. It’s more mappy and wordy and facey. But I know some of you guys do have charty blogs. And for you there is something new and potentially cool: the Data Collective.

It’s a nonprofit, currently in “alpha” (ie, not yet fully released), that wants to improve public discourse by making it less truthy and more fact-based. The idea, as one of the creators, David Joerg, explained it to me, is

1. that you make interactive, rather than static, charts on your blog,
2. that readers can click on the underlying data and play around with it,
3. that anybody can share the chart, as you might share a YouTube video, so that it can go viral.

As David emailed me,

The linkage to underlying data is especially nice because it allows curious readers to play with the data in new ways — making their own charts, verifying a chart’s correctness, pointing out alternative / better data sources, and so on.

And David has an offer:

We are in a private alpha at this point, which means that if you or a friend would like some charts, we’ll happily take your data or your research requests and make a bespoke chart. Later on, we’ll make a website where you can make your own charts.