“Everything is information and information is everything. It’s the mantra of marketing in an age where people are constantly creating collectible data—all the things we do, say, use, buy, click and share are data points in the graphs of our lives. But in an increasingly visual society, pie charts and bar charts can’t begin to do justice to this wealth of information there is to digest now. Data visualization tools are helping to change the ways we look at information and audiences. While a lot of these are just plain fun to look at, there is far more potential than just painting a prettier picture. Good data visualization communicates information clearly and effectively, where form and functionality work together to tell sophisticated stories, uncover relationships and patterns, and reveal insights that might otherwise go unseen. While many of these tools are, at this stage, more about experimentation than expertise, they are indicators of the near future where we can make much smarter strategic decisions just by finding some cooler ways to crunch the numbers.
Nexus
Nexus is an interactive social network grapher that visually displays connections between Facebook friends and their shared interests with one click.
Tag Galaxy
Tag Galaxy is a tag based visualization using planetary constellations to playfully browse Flickr images with little related tags orbiting the center of the tag galaxy.
Twitrratr
Twitrratr is a sentiment analyzer that organizes and distinguishes the matching posts for any given keyword by positive, neutral and negative tweets.
Track This Now
Track This Now tracks YouTube, Flickr and Twitter in 236 countries in real time and displays the results of the chosen topic geographically on a world map.
Trendrr
Trendrr is an easy and free service that tracks dynamic data trends over time across leading social media and e-commerce sites in a digestible format.
Google Analytics Motion Charts
Google Analytics Motion Charts plots your own data or most Google Analytics reports to visualize change over time as multi-dimensional animated bubble charts.
Check out the del.icio.us bookmark list for more tools: DELICIOUS.COM/DATAVISUALIZATIONTOOLS
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Re-post authored by Frank Striefler and Erik Hanson (TBWA\Media Arts Lab) published on May 11th, 2009 via the PSFK blog.
Jeremi Karnell
President, One to One Interactive
http://www.onetooneinteractive.com
