I’ve been playing around a bit more with Google spreadsheets. There are some handy functions for importing data from the web:

• GoogleFinance function allows you to get stock data from Google Finance.
• GoogleLookup can answer simple questions such as the population of India or the length of the Amazon river.
• Various import functions can grab data from an HTML page, CSV file, XML or RSS feed.

As a simple example I made a spreadsheet that grabs the Technorati ranks of the top 10 economics blogs in my ranking using the ImportHTML function and then dumps that data to a graph. Then I can embed the graph here (unfortunately it doesn’t show up in RSS):

One problem is that the graph doesn’t automatically update with the latest data from the table unless the owner of the spreadsheet (me) actually opens it to refresh the data. For publishing graphs like this, it would be nice if the latest data could be fetched more frequently, so the graph would remain up to date at all times.

Of course, since the source data is on my own site, I could’ve just generated a graph directly from the original data using a graphing package on my web server, rather than going via Google spreadsheets. The advantage of the Google route is that it’s extremely simple, and more importantly you can easily use it to grab data from other people’s sources, to use for your own analysis.