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You gotta love the sparkline charts in this interactive.

Click on the image to view the graphics

Not all the sectors are in bad shape. As you can see local government and state government are still doing pretty well. I guess we need more people in the government to do the right thing ;/

Now that the election is over and I am well rested, I want to look back at what we have worked on all these months at msnbc.com. A few people wrote me asking about the process of creating a large scale project in a fast paced environment. Here is a longer answer to that question. Since this post will be a bit long, I will break it into several sections.

Pre-election content

We put a huge amount of effort into the Decision ’08 Dashboard data explorer map. Many people had been preparing interactive content for our election coverage for months before I arrived. By the time I started in July 2008, most of the core functionality of the map had been developed. My first assignment was to support other developers and designers, by preparing data and writing small utility classes. Next, I created the polling data display and helped with designing the fundraising data display.

Click on image to see full size.

Updated Nov. 5, 2008: 0:55 a.m.The widget maps turned out to be a huge success. We are approaching 100,000 installs and more than 10 million page views. The critical moment has passed and the number of installs decreased as expected, but I am positive the maps will be viewed and installed many more times before they become obsolete.

Updated Nov. 4, 2008: 9:34 a.m. The widgets installs skyrocketed today exceeding what we set as a goal by a huge margin. They got embedded on several major Web sites and thousands of blogs and social network profiles. By the time the results come in and the widgets switch off the countdown clock, I expect the number of installs to jump even higher. Let’s hope that everything will go great today.

An interactive map that visualizes different kind of information related to the election ’08 such as demographic, polling and fundraising data. The interactive team at msnbc.com worked on it for months before I arrived. By the time I started, most of the core functionality have been written. I ended up working on the polling panel and helped with the fundraising panel.

You should spend some time exploring the map because it has a lot of interesting data that is not immediately apparent on the first screen.

When you get tired from looking at the enormous amount of data, you can head to the Analysis section and listen to what Chuck Todd has to say about the upcoming election. In the same section, you can make your own prediction or view possible scenarios. And if you are not yet completely satisfied, you can go ahead and check out previous elections.