Max Kiesler - Web Design, SOMA San Francisco

Visuwords online graphical dictionary is a way to look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate. Visuwords uses Princeton University's WordNet, an opensource database built by University students and language researchers. Combined with a visualization tool and user interface built from a combination of modern web technologies, Visuwords is available as a free resource to all patrons of the web. To use the dictionary just enter words into the search box to look them up or double-click a node.

If you've ever wanted to see your website usage on a large screen in a very visual way this is the application for you. From the demo video the visuals look stunning. As the earth turns you see your website visitors pop up on the globe in real-time also showing you a variety of other statistical data. One of the coolest features is the ability to hook up an interactive whiteboard or SMART board and be able to turn the earth with your fingers. Just like in the movie "Minority Report". I do wish they would produce a web base application so my website visitors could see this information in real-time. Nice product.

One of the first sites that got me interested in real-time data visualizations was digg spy. I had just become hooked on digg when the spy came out, and watching the stories asynchronously roll by was even more intriguing than going to the regular home page. As they say on the digg site, "Digg BigSpy places stories at the top of the screen as they are dugg. As new stories are dugg, older stories move down the list. Bigger stories have more diggs. The projects currently in Digg Labs are the results of collaboration with Digg partner Stamen Design. As the project matures, we'll be releasing a public API to allow outside developers access to this data".

There are many search tools for finding new music on the web. Just type in, "artist, genre or title and you'll find some results. Ho Hum. I've been forced to use this same music search paradigm for years. However, there is a new breed of music sites cropping up that will give you new ways to discover new music. "Musiclens enables users to find pieces of music using very vaguely described criteria, such as loudness (perceived volume), mood or purpose. The search or recommendation query can be enhanced or limited by adjusting the ten navigation control sliders". This site works well and has a great visualization tool.

The Stockholm based website Gapminder provides wonderful interactive content visualizations of important global trends. This non-profit provides information from universities, UN organisations, public agencies and non-governmental organizations to graphically show us the state of what's happing in our world. The site looks at 16 different human conditions and plots them by year and by region. Conditions include, urban population, life expectancy, military budget, and 13 other world conditions you should know. Currently, this is the most important content visualization site for consciously minded world citizens. Please visit this site to see what's really going on in the world you life in. Giant hats off to the developers, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Ronnlund and Hans Rosling!

Recently new forms of search visualization have been on the rise. Snap is a great example of a new way to view search results. The applications allows you to view an image of the page your about to visit before you go there. The site is broken into two panes one with the search results and the other with a screenshot of the page. In the screenshot pane you can choose three different sizes of screenshots. You can view the site with either a new window or in the larger left pane. As a visual person I found it to be a fun way to browse search results.

Most of the sites that I've featured recently that have to do with content visualization have really been about deep discovery. If you take that notion and apply it to a search engine you have mnemo map. With mnemo you can search Yahoo!, flickr, and YouTube by tags, synonyms and translations for any search term. mnemo, "combines the technologies of social networking, search engines and other data sources to help you formulate search queries and find really relevant information". I have to say the site is a very refreshing way to search! Thanks.

Lovelines is one of the most unique content visualization ideas I've seen recently. "Using a data collection engine created by the artists for their recent collaboration, We Feel Fine - wefeelfine.org, Lovelines examines thousands of blogs every few minutes to find expressions of love and hate, posted by all manner of people. When it can, Lovelines identifies and saves the age, gender, and geographical location of the person who wrote the post, and then presents that information along with the post." Lovelines shows it's data in words, pictures and superlatives. Words and pictures present individual examples of love and hate. Superlatives provides a daily zeitgeist of the most loved and hated things. All in all a very amazing content visualization of how the blogosphere feels about love and hate on a up to the minute basis.

In the last year I've seen many amazing new content visualization models, however, Digg will be launching something truly amazing in July. After being a web application designer for more than eleven years I almost became verklempt watching the latest version of DiggNation. The new features show incoming links in real time, but unlike Digg Spy the incoming posts and comments are shown on a real time visualization map. You can use a slider to show more or less content per page, and in one view real time diggs come in an cluster around a post. This is not only impressive, but possible revolutionary. Thanks to Digg and stamen design for producing such a great new visualization model!

Have you ever wanted to display your own web content in a 3D space? I know that I have. Several year ago I produced two different experimental websites using 3D Spaces. One was a flash site and the other was a flat html site. At the time the problem I ran into was a smooth way to show the actual content of the site. gogofrog has fixed many of the problems I had in this space and taken 3D content sites to the public. It's very easy to create your own webspace with gogofrog in just a matter of minutes. Give it a try!