Content Matters

Thanks to Tim O'Reilly for the heads up on this one.

The Visual Communications Lab at IBM has launched into alpha a social visualization platform called Many Eyes, led by data visualization gurus Martin Wattenberg and Fernando Viegas.

The site falls into a new category, described by its designers as "social data analysis".  Similar in ways to Swivel, profiled here a few weeks ago, Many Eyes allows users to upload data sets, which then can be used by other users to create visual analyses.  While Swivel's visual tools are more rudimentary graphs and charts, Many Eyes uses some of the more advanced forms of data visualization including Treemaps and Bubble Charts.

Like Swivel, Many Eyes has been seeded with various data sets, many from government data sources.  Users can upload their own data and use that posted by others.

Data visualization is starting to take hold, after years of fits and stops.  One of the strengths of the Many Eyes site is the diversity of visual maps which they offer.  No single map is appropriate for all data or for all users.  Many users still prefer simple rows and columns for viewing data, while others take more quickly to visualization.  New tools like Many Eyes and Swivel, along with established visualization tools like Grokker, offer compelling ways to navigate and mine data.