Visualizing Data in New Ways

We’re always on the lookout for new/better ways of visualizing data.  Blake recently pointed me to an awesome tool called Many Eyes, which is a relatively new effort by IBM’s Collaborative User Experience.  As they explain it, “Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to ‘democratize’ visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis.”

It looks like their community members have already created more than 18,000 visualizations, with several even relating to Mozilla in some way.  For example, the visualization below takes an internet population data set from internetworldstats.com and displays it via a treemap (it was created by the user seadub ealier this week).  I encourage you to click on the image below to see for yourself just how interactive and valuable this tool can be.  From just a fraction of a second glance, it’s easy to see that Asia represents the largest internet population by a fairly large margin and that China and the U.S. are the largest countries.