J. eric,

I think that this (data visualization) is becoming a very hot, growing field and that your examples are great.

In regards to the business logic behind this sort of thing, has anyone checked out tools like this:

http://www.tableausoftware.com

http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/

http://www.swivel.com/

They seem more like they are geared towards business / professional usage.

Tim

Kinda ixd-related, kinda-not. I've had an easy time pitching data visualization for art/design projects, but I'm making my first attempt at pitching it in a business as an area of research.

The problem is to make the case for doing visualizations of public information past the spreadsheet/bar graph level. For example, twitter analysis of client-related keywords relative to verbs like "fail" or "return" or proper nouns like names of competing products. Part of the challenge is that one of the parties involved has referred to visualization as "making pretty pictures".

The first part of my response is simply, "Pretty sells". Sure, we could sell someone a spreadsheet or a bar graph, but a "pretty" product that people enjoy using will be an easier sell. The second part of my response is that visualization is a well documented and market validated way of looking at data and to cite everyone from Tufte to Fry.

My current examples of fun/pretty interactive visualization projects that are also business related are:

Wattenberg et al's Baby Name Wizard, <http://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager>, a fun way to dig through ~100 years of census data and a sales teaser for a book on choosing names for babies.

NYT/Netflix interactive who-rented-what-where map:
<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/01/10/nyregion/20100110-netflix-map.html>.

The Google-powered map of news stories across categories and countries, <http://newsmap.jp>. I'm not sure how this makes money, but it's a nice info wall for tracking what's hot in the news.

Suggestions for others of this quality that are als professional/business sites? I'm trying to avoid political or art visualizations as examples and are excluding projects like Many Eyes and They Rule.

thx

(note to self: after the pitch, write up a wiki/blog post with a list of all the good suggestions.)



--

SignalFive
Timothy Jaeger
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