I just had chance to play with a fantastic data visualization tool from IBM: Many Eyes. You can upload data sets or use data sets that others have uploaded to create all the regular visualizations (charts, etc), but also maps and treemaps, like this one that I built from party registration information in the early 2008 states:


The big blobs are states (Iowa, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada). The size of the blobs represents the number of registered voters in 2004. You can see the small county boxes inside the states, showing the number of registered voters in each county. You can then zoom in on a state to see just the counties within that state. Within New Hampshire, I had town-level data readily available, so you can soom in to a particular county and see the towns in that county.

As a user, you have the power to easilly click away and play with the data in a way that emailing you a PowerPoint chart will never give you. You can play with the chart and explore the data by changing almost anything about the chart:

• The colour of the shading currently shows the number of democrats. You can change it to republicans, or independents at the flip of a switch
• The size of the boxes are the number of registered voters. Again, you can change it to be the number of republicans, or independents at the flip of a switch
• You can change the sorting from State > County > Town to sort instead by County, or by Town
  

Isn't this a great way to let someone explore complex data? I love it!

The site's purpose is to "harness the collective intelligence of the net for insight and analysis." This sounds like a great goal. The thing I'm really interested in is that it allows someone to gather some neat data and easily visualize it in novel and interesting ways that others can tweak. Power to the people, indeed.

Is this the start of the end of sending a pack of PowerPoint charts? Instead hopefully we'll soon be able to quickly and easily send links to online visualizations that users can play with and get a feel for. Lets hope this is just a first step in this area.