Max Kiesler - Web Design, SOMA San Francisco

While I've seen several color based searches they are usually for images. Etsy has created a color based search for products which gives you results based on colors you select in their easy to navigate color grid. To use the search just mouse over the color grid and click on the color. Then click the item to get a closer look and some more details. If you are interested in this item and want to find out more just click the item title. From there you can purchase the selected item.

Timepiece is an experimental data visualization that help you explore Filmforay's site content including, all of their film ideas, new members, comments and votes on each film idea. Presently there is five months worth to data explore, however, this will undoubtedly grow. As stated by LInden at Filmforay, "The visualization is done with Adobe Flash and pulls all recent data from the site, updated every 30 minutes. Currently it takes a pretty heavy toll on your CPU and loading does take some time, so older computers might have some trouble running it. And I'll admit the design wouldn't scale very well given a larger data set, but for the meager traffic filmforay has received so far it does just fine!" Time is one of the most challenging aspects to represent in data visualizations. Linden has created a very unique view of his site's content over time. Nice job.

20% of the world's Internet traffic is delivered over the Akamai platform. During the period I was viewing this visualization they were receiving an average of 2 million visitor per second. Until now only Akamai and our customers had access to this information. Now you can view real-time data and identify the global regions with the greatest attack traffic, cities with the slowest Web connections (latency), and geographic areas with the most Web traffic (traffic density). This suite of visualizations include, real-time web monitoring, network performance comparisons, visualize all of Akamai's traffic, and also see net usage for the retail, new and music industries.

Highslide JS is an open source JavaScript software, offering a Web 2.0 approach to popup windows. It streamlines the use of thumbnail images and HTML popups on web pages. The library has many features such as no plugins like Flash or Java required, popup blockers are no problem. The content expands within the active browser window. Single click. After opening the image or HTML popup, the user can scroll further down or leave the page without closing it. Compatibility and safe fallback. If the user has disabled JavaScript or the JavaScript fails in any way, the browser redirects directly to the image itself or to a fallback HTML page. This fallback is able to cope with most exceptions and incompatibilities.

Kartoo is a meta search engine which presents its results on a map. To try it enter your request and click on the "OK" button. As soon as you launch a search, Kartoo analyses your request, questions the most relevant engines, selects the best sites and places them on a map. In this map, the found sites are represented by more or less important size pages, depending on their relevance. When you move the pointer over these pages, the concerned keywords are illuminated and a brief description of the site appears on the left side of the screen. A series of keywords appears. You can refine your search by clicking subjects. To go to the next map, click on the "map nb x" button.

Digg Arc is another great data visualization from digg labs that provideds a broader and deeper view of Digg.. As the labs site states, "Digg Arc displays stories, topics, and containers wrapped around a sphere. Arcs trail users as they digg stories across topics. Stories with more diggs make thicker arcs. Labs projects are the results of collaboration with Digg partner Stamen Design. We've also released a public API for Digg so that anyone can turn Digg data into their own visualizations." I spend a lot of time at digg labs to see a more visual and broader view of all stories being dugg.

If you frequent websites like Amazon, YouTube, flickr and eBay you probably love the mass of content that you can see at sites like these. As a designer I tire of "sameness" in ways to browse websites. With the exception of flickr the only way to browse the content on these sites is the all to common linear list view. oSkope gives you another. As they say on their website, "oSkope is a search assistant with a highly intuitive visual interface. oSkope lets you browse quickly through a large number of images a preview information with minimal paging. Selected items can be saved by registered users." In many of my test searches I found the information or product I was looking for much more quickly than on the websites themselves. While I can save individual products in a folder I also wish I could save searches. The product is still in beta, however, it is a very fun, intuitive and functional way to search the selected websites. Thanks to the developers and designers.

New ways to visualize time based content is the next frontier of interaction design. Andy Biggs has finally come up with a new way to view time based RSS content in an easy to use and visually stunning manor. RssVoyage is a step beyond most current feed readers. Andy is a senior flash developer who decide to explore RSS in a 3D viewer. To quote Andy, "Voyage is a RSS Feed agregator that sorts the feeds based on date of each item posted. The user then scrolls through their feeds in 3d using the mouse wheel." While it might be difficult to view 1000 feed with the current application, it's a brilliant proof of concept for a new way to visualize RSS content. The only suggestions I would have are a few additional controls. It would be helpful if there was a way to stop the mouse scroll by a clicking. A feature to zoom the size of the posts would help with large amounts of data. Finally, a way to filter the feeds would allow me to see only the content I wished. Thanks Andy for the great insight into this new way of visualizing RSS feeds.

This project is an example of the "elastic list" principle for browsing multi-facetted data structures. The data is based on the Noble prize winners dataset used in the Flamenco facet browser. Elastic lists enhance traditional facet browsing approaches by, visualizing relative proportions (weights) of metadata values by size, visualizing unusualness of a metadata weight by brightness and animated filtering transitions. To use the application click any number of list entries to query the database for a combination of the selected attributes. If you create an "impossible" configuration, your selection will be reduced until a match is possible. You can also switch on little sparklines to see the temporal distribution of each metadata value. While I've seen this concept used several times before the elastic list interface was very fresh. Thanks!

Twittervision is a real-time geographic visualization of posts to Twitter. The application is basically a mash-up of the Twitter API and Google Maps. The interaction is smooth and fast and gives you a great vision into who's Twittering around the world and at what speed. If you're as big of a fan of Twitter as I am you spend far too much time viewing the Twitter map. In order to try out the application just sign up for twitter and post. You must have a location and an image defined to appear on the public feed (and to be located on the map). Hats off to David Troy who spent his free time to develop this fun visualization of Twitter.