UPDATE: Oops, hold your programming skills: according to the official rules: "this Challenge is open to users who are physically located in the United States". This seems outdated on so many levels...
Thnkx @driven_by_data
There isn't a real shortage of data visualization competitions lately, as high-profile magazines, communities, ngo's, and popular blogs left and right seem to continuously encourage the home-based information designer to come out and demonstrate their talent in terms of making complex data comprehensible and enjoyable to explore.
The latest contestant in this search for the best visualization designer (or should I say, the next employee?) is Google, who, together with Eyebeam, just announced their profound interest in both federal tax numbers as well as interactive bubble graphs.
This naturally all culminates in an ambitious Data Viz Challenge [datavizchallenge.org], which will be juried by viz gurus like Aaron Koblin and Jonathan Harvis.
Each competition entry must use the data from WhatWePayFor.com, be graphical, and have some legible relationship to the underlying data. That somehow legible relationship though, as they describe here, must be excellent in terms of storytelling, clarity, relevance, utility, and... aesthetics.
So, what are you waiting for?