If only data was represented this way in school.
After watching Hans Rosling’s TED Talk debunking myths about the developing world (http://bit.ly/bkVYhE) – and being completely blown away, I might add – I was wondering if there was a cheap, half-cracked way I could simulate his method of data representation and trending. I figured using Keynote to play around with single frame images would yield a similar effect, or I could be super lazy and just have the images fade into one another. But, alas, both of these alternatives require a lot of faking and will probably still look… hmmm what’s the politically correct term for “ghetto”?
But now, I’ve found it.
Behold IBM’s Many Eyes project (http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/) which allows users to graph just about anything and show it in a digestible, interesting and visually appealing way.
Examples are posted every day by folks trying it out. Everything from significant world trending stats to info about Rock in Rio is on there. One of my personal favourites is this world cloud of Facebook breakups by month!
…that will be all.
