Max Kiesler - Web Design, SOMA San Francisco

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.

There are many directory management tools out there, however, Relay is worth checking out. Relay is a free, downloadable AJAX powered directory manager that feels very much like a desktop application. Features include, drag-n-drop files and folders, dynamic loading file structure, upload progress bar, thumbnail view, including pdf and multiple users & accounts. Awesome open source AJAX app!

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!

Thickbox includes the functionality of the Greybox technique with that of Lightbox, to product a great model window solution. The script allows you show structural markup and images in the window. The html that is shown inside ThickBox is pulled from the server using AJAX. Additionally, Thickbox uses a compressed version of jquery rather than the close to 100k of Prototype & Scriptaculous to create a lightweight model window solution.

Model windows or lightboxes are being used on many sites today. I've been using them for over a year now in a variety of ways including login boxes, bookmarkletts, and alerts. Prototype has come through again by producing a series of samples that you can use yourself. This javascript class allows you to add window in a HTML page. This class is based on Prototype. The code is inspired by the powerful script.aculo.us library. You can even use all script.aculo.us effects to show and hide windows if you include effects.js file , but it's not mandatory. It has been tested on Safari, Camino, Firefox and IE6. Enjoy!

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!

Rendr 2 was originally developed as a rapid html prototyping tool, however, the possibilities are endless. As an experiment I downloaded the source and tried designing a page for a marketing site I was working on. I have to say that as a coder / designer the interaction of the app was amazing. I've tried designing as I code several times all with fairly good results. In many ways Render 2 added the missing link to this process by getting rid of the hole drag your page to the browser process. Seeing elements change live makes all of the difference.

New models for content visualization are popping up all the time now. Box Grid was originally developed as an experimental blog site. The two things I find most fascinating about Box Grid are the fact that it was originally released in 2002, and that does not use flash. The interface is all CSS and javascript based. While this type of content visualization will not work for every project it is place where we can start to imagine new ways to surf a website. The source code is also downloadable! Big hats off to the designer.