We’re happy to announce today that the Silk team is joining Palantir.

Silk started with the goal of helping people get the most out of their data. Over the last few years, we’ve worked relentlessly on a vision to help people structure, query, visualize and share data.

We’re proud of the product and community we built, and of all the data journalists, activists, NGOs, businesses and many other kinds of people that were able to find important insights and tell great data stories through Silk.

When we met the Palantir team, we realized that we could work on even bigger and more important data problems with an incredibly talented team – even if it meant no longer working on the Silk product. We decided to join Palantir because we believe we can achieve a larger impact there than we could at Silk alone.

What will happen to Silk.co?

Silk.co as a platform will continue to operate. Nothing will change to current Silks, and you can still create a new Silk for free. However, because of our new roles at Palantir, Silk.co will operate “as is” and we will not be able to provide technical or customer support to new or existing Silk accounts any longer, nor will we be doing any further development work or adding new features to the hosted Silk.co product.

Your data, including the data in your Silks, email addresses, passwords, and any other information will remain confidential and as always, not be shared.

We have immensely enjoyed working on Silk and helping all our users, and are looking forward to the next chapter ahead with our friends and future colleagues at Palantir.

Best,

The Silk Team

This post on cleaning data is the second in a 3-part series on extracting, cleaning and enhancing data. Be sure to also check out part 1 about data extracting and part 3 about data enhancing.

It’s an inconvenient truth: most data you find on the web is messy and often needs to be thoroughly cleaned. At Silk.co we spend a good amount of time cleaning data and we figured we’d share some of the tricks we picked up along the way!

This post on extracting data from a website is the first in a 3-part series on extracting, cleaning and enhancing data. Be sure to check out part 2 about data cleaning and part 3 about data enhanching as well.

Some sites already have their data in a neat table, allowing you to easily copy and paste it into a spreadsheet. Wikipedia is a good example of this. Others offer their data for download in a spreadsheet format.

However, it’s not always that easy. If you come across a website with structured information that isn’t downloadable or organized in a table, you might have to turn to specialized tools to extract your data. Here are some of the ones we use at Silk.co to create our own data stories.

And the best part? You don’t need to know how to code for using the tools listed below, just a bit of patience and a good idea of what you’re looking for. Good luck!

You brilliant folks created lots of pretty amazing Silks this first quarter! Here’s a small preview of what else is yet to come.

A data-driven analysis of gender representation in 88 years of Oscars

Over the 88 editions of the Academy Awards, several things have remained constant. The Red Carpet. The golden statuette. And the absence of women nominees.

Which isn’t to say that women are absent from the event. During the Academy Awards season, pictures of actresses monopolize the front pages of websites, magazines, newspapers, and TV shows. Their bodies are discussed, their designer clothes, their hairstyles, their make-up, their dates.

And still, very few women are actually nominated for an Oscar. And even less win one.

Let’s look at numbers. Did you know that in the history of the awards, only 17% of the nominees have been women? Or that in the upcoming 2016 Oscars, five categories had no female nominee at all? In this Silk, I explored the data behind the Gender Gap at the prestigious Academy Awards. Read the findings below and follow the original Silk resource for the next updates.

What if you could, say, automatically collect information on journalism meetups around the world and map the next events on a Silk site?

Well, now you can. As of today, our brand new Google Sheets Sync will let you link your Silk to your Sheet, and interactive visualizations will automatically update to reflect any changes. Once you set up the sync, you will never have to manually re-import a spreadsheet in your Silk ever again.

This means that hundreds of millions of Sheets users can now transform their static spreadsheets into dynamically updated maps, charts, galleries, tables, and full data websites in minutes. And as a Google Sheet is updated over time, the linked Silk will automatically update all visualizations, pages, and datacards to reflect the new changes.

We’re happy to announce we’ve redesigned our filters! Adding a filter is a more streamlined experience now, and we’ve added features to give you more control over how your filters work.

Here is how the filters look on a live embed from world.silk.co: