Visualization Technologies

In September, I viewed an excellent Factiva webinar “Transforming the Future of Search with Visualization” with Greg Merkle, Factiva’s Associate Vice President, Product Design. Viewers were shown examples of new visualization technologies on the Web, how corporations and other organizations are using them, and emerging trends and themes.

Here is one visualization technology that we looked at from News.com:

News.com offers this feature called The Big Picture. When you select a news headline, you get the full-text of the article and a visual illustrating three dimensions relating to the news article:

-related companies (red bubbles)
-related topics (green bubbles)
-related news stories (grey bubbles)

The visual (the one above is for the news story “Oracle maintains quick pace for takeovers, exec says,” October 6th) shows you the world around the specific company/topic/story you’re interested in. At a quick glance, you can see which companies/topics/stories are popular with News.com readers over time. You can click on a bubble to centre the visual on another related company/topic/story. Once the focal point of the visual changes, its appearance will also change as new links are made. The bigger the bubble, the more popular the company/topic/story. You can also change the display of the visual by choosing whether you want to see companies/topics/stories all at once or on their own.

Here’s another one:

The “What’s Hot” view of a news story on News.com shows you at a glance which stories are most popular with News.com readers (the visual above is for the story “Google makes video play with YouTube buy,” October 9th). The bigger the box, the more popular the story. The brighter the box, the newer the story. You can also click on a box to view the fulltext of the headline. This feature is updated every time a story is published, or at least every hour.