Periodic Table of Visualization

This table is a must-see site for anyone who works creating visualizations. This website from visual-literacy.org has grouped visual methods into six categories (like Concept Visualization and Metaphor Visualization), and made it interactive so when you move your mouse over one of the specific methods it shows you an example.

This is a great resource to help inspire you to visualize your data in new ways. I find that I like trying to visualize the same data in a couple different ways to find out which works best at communicating the data to others. Ironically it's missing the visual method of laying out data into a periodic table!

2008 Presidential Campaign Finances

This interactive infographic from the New York Times website is really impressive. Using weekly data reported by the Federal Election Commission, it plots the contributions on a map of the U.S. and sizes the bubbles based on contributions from that city. It has data from every week since January 1st, so it will also "play" and animated version showing the contribution as time progresses (similar to the Trendalyzer that Google purchased from GapMinder).

You can also search for specific contributors to see which candidate campaigns they have contributed to, and how much they gave.

Periodic Table of the Internet

Wellington Grey has created a graphic representing some of the internet's most popular sites in a familiar layout. The Periodic Table of the Internet groups the most popular sites on the web in categories like Search Engines, Aggregators, Operating Systems, Blogs, Social Networking, etc. Each individual block links to its respective site.

Web Trend Map 2007 v2

Our friends over at InformationArchitects.com have updated their WebTrends poster showing the...

...200 most successful websites on the web, ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective. We have done it again – and better. Upon popular demand – here is iA’s next Web Trend Map:

Thanks to Brian Johnson from the Microsoft Mac BU for pointing this one out.

Jonathan Harris TED Talks 2007

Jonathan Harris is working on some cool, interesting, fascinating but weird stuff. This is his presentation at TED 2007 about We Are Fine and his new project Universe. You can see this on the TED site here.

Universe is now live at universe.daylife.com, and you can enter a news topic and watch it graphically associate all of the relevant stories in the media about that topic. This would be really cool for consumer products too, but sadly that doesn't exist.

The TED Talks are now available on iTunes as free video podcasts. I've been watching some older ones from 2002-2007.