I got the link to this excellent post during my first InfoVis class at VT, it’s a great collection of Information Visualization projects on the web. A must-bookmark for anyone interested in visualizations. The web is like the melting pot for such applications, and that’s understandable, if not for anything else, then for the sheer number of data sets available to visualize.

As I was browsing through them, I enjoyed some more than the others, and that led me to wonder if I can setup an experiment to rate them. That’s pretty difficult though. If providing a “higher insight” is considered as the ultimate goal of a visualization, then it becomes rather hard to rate them. Insights are a function of so many things that even an experimental setup may find it hard to extract the “Interface driven insight” part of them. Especially when the visualizations themselves are about such diverse subjects. However, what attracts me to visualizations is the fact that they are so much like works of art, and hence, some of them just stand apart.

The stand apart for me was the Hans Rosling talk at TED. You’ve got to watch it.