Mashups and Data Visualizations

Three recent presentations and one announcement may be of interest to community indicators practitioners. The first is from the recent InfoVis conference where folks from Google, Swivel, and Many Eyes shared their perspectives on the impact of social data visualization.

The second came from a librarian, Darlene Fichter, sharing how to do mash-ups and data visualizations using available (as in free) tools on the web, with lots of examples. This is where you use existing data from other places with some sort of data visualization tool, such as mapping technology, to create something new and informative that displays data in a way that makes more sense to the viewer or illustrates connections not otherwise as readily apparent.

The third is from the IEEE international conference on data mining, where the folks from Swivel shared their perspectives on "motivations and challenges for technology in collaborative data analysis and visualization".

The announcement (sort of a pre-announcement of an intention to try to do something worth announcing later) is that GraphWise and Swivel have begun talking together, which can only be good news for those of us who want information easily available and compellingly displayed.

(Side note: I'm looking for someone who attended the Public Performance Measurement Reporting Network conference this past weekend to share a few words on this blog about the highlights of the conversations. If you're interested, e-mail me.)