I've been playing with ranking things in charts recently, rather than charting their actual values. There are some clear benefits to ranking things:
- sharp focus on the order
- clear sense of best / worst
- simple to grasp for non-technical users
- we avoid having to squint to see small differences on a chart

... But there are some big problems, also:
- no sense of real-world distance between points
- no sense of whether anything on the chart actually scored 'well'

So for example the music charts are simple to grasp. And the concepts of 'number one' and 'top ten' are often discussed, we have no sense of whether number ten sold anything like as many as number ten. And whether number one sold a lot or a little.

I tried to take the best of both worlds with this visualization of the popularity of dance music in a few countries. It seems to do the trick for me. Let's see if it works for anyone else :)