[curiousuburb]

So by now we've probably all seen Google Maps and the clone that is Microsoft's VE. (You can even test them side-by-side)
Flash users may be keen to play with the Neave Lab version.
There are even some prototype Games based on these maps.

If you've got Tiger or similarly modern OS, you may have played with Google Earth.

I've often shown students new to the web some of the visualizations at cybergeography.org, particularly their Atlas of Cyberspace section.

But today I spotted a couple of new sources that made me go hmmm.

First was The Prejudice Map, which is a novel construct from Google search data.
(not sure if it updates dynamically, but that would make it more interesting.)

Then the big dent in my day arrived... http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/ ... maps wazzoo... many with links to the actual project software.

Holy highways of colour and hyperlinked hotspots, batman!



From Flickr photos grouped by keyword and graphed based on the time in their EXIF data, to the degrees of separation between LiveJournal bloggers; through transport maps of bus and underground lines, through traffic visualizations of servers; from webs and trees that are literally biological, through governement spending that seems to grow like an organism, to visual thesaurus and mind maps... visual complexity indeed.

Some are cheesy and retro, some are so blurred with datapoints that the forest dominates the trees, some are more 'proof of concept' than practical. 263 kinds and counting.

Don't say your productivity hasn't been warned...

[Ichiban_jay]

that cnet.com one... (or news.com) it just doesn't really visually work. Just has too much stuff on it. I remember when I first saw it... I was like what the heck?!

[curiousuburb]

I haven't been through them all, but clearly a few of them are overloaded with data and impractical as a navigation aid... but as far as visualization of relationships or large scale patterns, there are some interesting ones.

Some are just plain cool and/or would make awesome backgrounds/screensavers.