Top 10 examples of Data Visualization

Jul 5, 2009 by Dan Taylor    11 Comments    Posted under: Technology

With the tremendous amount of data circulating the internet at any given moment, it’d be nice to see some graphic representations of what’s actually happening, instead of just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s.

Add to that the what would most certainly be a maddening exercise in trying to find related content to the mix, and data visualizations become all the more important.  These data visualizations below represent to me the most meaningful and useful tools available.  They cover everything from Digg activity to Network connectivity, to simply watching the world tweet the day away.

Music and Movies

Liveplasma is movie and music visualization app that allows you to see related musicians and movies you might enjoy based on your initial input.  Enter the name of your favorite band, film, artist, or director and Liveplasma will map corresponding links to other similar artists and represent their relevance by size.

Fidg’t uses both last.fm and flickr tags to allow you to visualize your network and their tagging activities.  A rather handy tool, as I noticed most people that photograph flowers also like classical music.  Perhaps this is just my network, but interesting to correlate the data.  You might be surprised at some of the trends you discover.

Digg, Twitter, and Flickr

Arc has been my screensaver for quite a while.  Not only does it track the latest stories on Digg, but also shows the relationships between users that are submitting and digging these articles.  Arc offers two different modes, one a blitzkrieg of (semi) real time output, and the other (my personal choice) is a bit slower, allowing you to actually read the story headlines.

Stack takes the functionality of Arc a bit further and shows stories with the most recent activity across the bottom of the screen.  New digs drop from the top of the screen and load on top of the most recent, and a real time graph visualizes the activity patterns.  As activity for one story or another increases, those decreasing in activity are brushed off the bottom of the screen.

TwittEarth is pure twitter joy.  This one uses geotagging of tweets to visualize a worldwide conversation.  Using a global map users are represented by cute often armless, pixar-like mosters, with their tweet visualized above their heads indicating user name and geographic location.  Maybe not the most productive of the visualization, but certainly one of the most fascinating to watch.

The Flickr Related Tag Browser is a might handy feature when either trying to narrow down a flickr search, or when simply flipping through the massive collection of images.  Using a chain-like sequence, by clicking on one related tag (those circling the original tag), users are presented with a Polaroid type image containing a selection of images that have been tagged with the search word.  A circle then surrounds the collection of images with associated tags.  If firehouse didn’t quite give you the image you were looking for, chances are Dalmatian is a related tag, and from there you might also explore sporting dogs to find that perfect Golden Retreiver image you were searching for.  On the flip side, expect a laugh or two when you realize others’ similar tagging preferences can lead you down a rather interesting path.

Teh Internetz

The Twingly Screensaver, which I use on my windows (only, sorry OSX peeps) machine pulls rss feeds and visualizes blog activity from around the world.  I always know when it’s 8am on the East Coast without even having to look at a clock.  Quite fun to watch America wake up and hit the ‘publish’ button.

The Web Trend Map 4 reminds me a bit of the Los Angeles subway map on a quiet day, and something akin to the Moscow subway system on a busy day.  While this is the fourth version of this tool, I only became away of it via twitter, where I regularly watch internet trends via twitscoop.  Unfortunately, I didn’t get a screenshot last Thursday, but as you can imagine, all roads lead to Michael Jackson.

Others

The TED Sphere is one of the most enjoyable ways to navigate through the tremendous amounts of offerings from TED.  The 3D sphere allows for navigation from either outside or inside, and presents videos based on semantic relevance and compatibility.

The We Feel Fine tool provides a visual representation of the overall feelings of the the blogosphere at any given time.  Users can filter results based on age, location, sex, weather, and many others.  We Feel Fine isn’t just limited to one presentation either, but provides users with sex different options: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.  Each of these unique visualization provide a different portrait of real-time events.

After playing around with close to 50 online data visualizers, there were the 10 that struck me the most.  Naturally, I didn’t list them all, but something tells me there are probably even a few that I missed.  What’s important to you in data visualization?  What are some of your favorites?  Let me know in the comments below.