[Quote] - The Best Tools for Visualization

To quote from Sarah Perez's article :

Visualization is a technique to graphically represent sets of data. When data is large or abstract, visualization can help make the data easier to read or understand.

In this article - "The Best Tools for Visualization", we can see many applications, tools and concepts in terms of "Visualization" from different categories, such as social network, music, internet, Amazon, Flickr, Search, News and etc.
Many of them are interesting and some of them are useful for our work about data. For instance, an interactive UI for British History Timeline is made by BBC. The UI lets user to click and drag the timeline to move left or right, and click the timeline to zoom in to any period. In general, we won't put 100 years history in a timeline chart, needless to say more than 2000 years, but BBC did that and did well. There are many examples like this in this great article, you can check it out.

anCharts - Great Charting Software

I'm not advertising here, but this company does really offer great charts by Flash technology that enable users to demonstrate their data more attractively and persuasively. Despite of commercial software, when you working on data representation, these charts (on the website) can inspire you to deal with charts by your own software or tools.

Drawing Good Graphs

How to draw good graphs ? Here are some principles in the lectures by Dr. Ross Ihaka, you can find plenty of materials about "Information Visualization" via the class website.

"One picture is worth ten thousand words."

• If the “story” is simple, keep it simple.
• If the “story” is complex, make it look simple.
• Tell the truth – don’t distort the data.

Some similar ideas are proposed on the post - "Displaying Data as Efficiently as Possible" in Nathan's Blog.

Alexa Web Traffic Graph

Alexa - the web information company provides functions to compare web traffic with several websites. The graph expression basically is line chart, but let users dynamically rearrange the X-scale with different meanings of Y. Here is an example, I compared 3 the most famous university sites in Taiwan, then Alexa showed me as below.