Timeline Mashup

Lifehacker recently posted about Dipity. Dipity lets you pull data from other online applications and RSS feed and presents it in a time line.

Visualizing Wikipedia's change history

Yuriy's presentation on wikis reminded me of a visualization from IBM's Collaborative User Experience Research group called History Flow. This visualization shows how the many different authors of a wiki page collaborate. An example from Discover Magazine demonstrates how the visualization can be used to study the history of an article. I think this is a really interesting way to look at collaboration.

More examples can be found here. The images are most dramatic for articles that are somewhat controversial or prone to vandalism because these articles have a high number of edits and lots of deletions and reversions.

A List Apart Issue 256

Issue 2^8 is right up our ally covering Google Maps and Visualizations. Visualizations are excellent and Wilson Miner's article covers how to make standards based visualizations. Paul Smith's article goes into how you can free yourself from Google's clutches and build your own maps.

VisuWords

I tripped over this interesting related word visualization program today... a very interactive and attractive Flash and actionscript based program. Not much to say other than wow, check this out! Perhaps it will inspire others who are creating related tag visualizers.

visualizing tags

We've been talking a lot about tagging recently. Even if you are a big proponent of tags, they won't do you any good if they aren't displayed so that you can explore them.

First, there is the ubiquitous tagcloud.

But tagclouds aren't the only way to explore tags. Some other examples:

Delicious Soup



Fidgt - uses "Tag Magnets" to find other users with the same tags.



Mind My Map



Images of Mind My Map and Delicious Soup are from Visual Complexity

FOAF network visualization

FOAF is an ontology for describing our online profiles and relationships with other people. It's not too interesting for the general users to view FOAF documents in their RDF form. We need visualization tools.

Couple interesting prototypes:

• FOAF explorer
• FOAF gear

You can read more about the FOAF gear here.

Many-eyes and social visualizations

A website that I am really excited about is Many-eyes.com, a social visualization website out of IBM's Visual Communication Lab. Users can upload datasets or create visualizations using their own or others' datasets. They can then embed the visualizations in their blogs or use the many-eyes site to discuss anything interesting they find in the data. Users can take snapshots and post them with their comments so that others can see the same view of the data that the comment is talking about.

For example, last night's State of the Union address has already been uploaded and someone created a tag cloud of the most commonly used words.


The idea for the site grew out of how people were interacting around sites such as NameVoyager, developed by Martin Wattenberg. Anecdotal evidence seemed to show that users spent more time interacting when they were in a group, either in real life or online. People created challenges to find unique names or names that were once popular and aren't any more.

So have fun playing with visualizations!