When you think about charts and data, “hilarious and witty” are most likely not your first thoughts that come to mind. Big data is all around us – why not make it easy on the eyes? We recently had the pleasure of spending some time with Jason Oberholtzer, blogger for Forbes and co-founder and curator of the popular Tumblr and published book, I Love Charts. As an Internet culture maven and charts junkie, he let us in on how he turns raw data into witty visualizations, the data sharing revolution, and of course, the I Love Charts’ journey from Tumblr to a Nation-wide selling book.

If you believe the hype, tonight’s U.S. Presidential debate is either a crucial tie-breaker that will determine the outcome of the elections or it will have absolutely no impact on voting day. No matter what the outcome or how the candidates perform, you can be sure that social media will be buzzing with reactions and new memes just like after the last three debates–and analyzing those reactions will provide an endless amount of information.

Your social listening, engagement, marketing, and customer support initiatives – and beyond them, a range of emerging, social-infused business processes (that is, every process that involves people) – require clean, complete, well-structured, and reliable social data. If you’re already a DataSift customer, you surely agree, but if you’re not yet convinced, poke around the DataSift site a bit and I’m sure you will come around.

Join us tonight for the 2012 Debates Social Pulse, the first ever, real time, minute-by-minute analysis of social sentiment for presidential candidates as the debates happen and beyond.

Today, we’re rounding up some of the top Social Data stories on the Web that you might have missed. From the government, to politics to customer targeting, the potential for using Social Media to derive insights is seemingly endless!

Last week, we attended the Social Media Strategies Summit in San Francisco, where Rob Bailey, our CEO, discussed the seven measurable actions that further your company’s marketing and social media efforts. In addition to providing a framework for moving your company’s efforts from beginner to pro, Rob highlighted companies who are thinking strategically about social media, such as Taco Bell, Burberry and KFC.