Data Visualization is the next frontier in online awesomeness

There are two online movements that are really get me excited these days (especially when they are used together). The first thing is 'behavior generated content' - the art of making personalized content based not on a users active creativity  but on logging a users behavior and create a structured format.  Wrote a blog post about it some time ago - check it here (personal note: it needs updating...).  The second thing is data visualization. The art of taking data and structuring it in a way that makes the data entertaining or informational. There are an increasing amount of sites, shows and companies that make excellent use of this.  Here are a few:

  • Mint.com (amazing company that slurps the data from your bank transactions and make interesting and informative graphs for you to enjoy - or improve your financial decision making with.
  • CNN (cant help put think they made great use of their electoral board. They managed to take boring election data interesting and informative - see picture here:
  • Jonathan Harris. (Visualization artist. Amazing guy who did some really cool data visuals for the Moma Exhibition Creativity and the elastic mind. His talks on Ted are also really cool. Watch them here.
  • Mashable's cool collection of datavisual projects: http://mashable.com/2008/11/24/data-visualizations/
  • Doplr did an super cool behavior generated content meets data visuals project at the end of the year. They are slupring my travel data from my google calender and send me this rapport. Note that I had not done anything else than giving them access to my travels. A great example of things to go. Click here for full image doplr
  • My two favorite blogs about the subject is infosthetics.com and visualcomplexity.com
  • And.... since everyone seems to be heading to South by SouthWest.. Here is a cool twitter data visualization project - much respect to slash7.com who did this:  http://pepsicozeitgeist.com/

Expect to see great things in this field - I for one is looking forward.

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