We always enjoy a good data visualization, especially when it’s elucidating what we are doing here at Scout Labs! On Wired Magazine this weekend was a infographic of what happens after you hit “Publish” on your blog page. It’s called “The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits - to You”. If you can figure out how to click and hold your mouse down to zoom it and scan around, you’ll see a category called “Data Miners” and I guess that’s partly us — the ones who analyze the blogosphere (and social networks and image-sharing sites and video sharing sites and user reviews) to make sense of it for clients overwhelmed by the sheer volume of it all. But we are also the “Corporations” (yes, “the Suits”), because real people at real companies are using our service to Scout what people love, hate, want, think and feel about their products, brands and services. What we are NOT: an ad network or aggregator trying to sell ads. We figure there are plenty of those out there desperately trying to get ads in front of eyeballs. Inspiring people to build better products and to build stronger relationships with customers sounds much more fun to us.

digg labs launched “pics” today as a new way to explore images that are submitted or dugg. It’s more of an exploration tool than a visualization, and there are a lot of duplicates for some reason. Still, it’s always fun to see what those guys cook up.

The interesting thing about data is not the “what.” It’s the “so what?”

As a case in point, this graph shows US government spending on document shredding contracts, which amounted to $452,807 in 2000 and ballooned to $2.9 million in 2006.

Now, one could suppose that the cost of shredding has skyrocketed. Maybe the shredding workers unionized for higher salaries and company cars. From the data alone, you couldn’t rule this out.

Of course we know enough about the current political climate to understand what’s really behind the data.

For more, visit usapending.gov, the government’s brand new and utterly fascinating database of federal spending.

One of our favorite muses, Jonathan Harris, just launched a new piece of visual storytelling and infoplay called The Whale Hunt. Here are a couple of snippets from his artist’s statement (hyperlinks his):

In May 2007, I spent nine days living with a family of Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost settlement in the United States…

I documented the entire experience with a plodding sequence of 3,214 photographs, beginning with the taxi ride to Newark airport, and ending with the butchering of the second whale, seven days later. The photographs were taken at five-minute intervals, even while sleeping (using a chronometer), establishing a constant “photographic heartbeat”. In moments of high adrenaline, this photographic heartbeat would quicken (to a maximum rate of 37 pictures in five minutes while the first whale was being cut up), mimicking the changing pace of my own heartbeat.

The results are beautiful, and like his other projects, he doesn’t expect you to passively watch. The Whale Hunt lets you experience the photographs as a straight slide show, but he’s also organized the whole experience across a few different dimensions.

You can constrain your experience of the story by any combination of cast member, concept (blood, buildings, prayer, sleep…), context or cadence (measured in photos per five-minute interval).

The photos themselves are rich and gorgeous, and the glimpse into this thousand-year-old Inupiat tradition is simply wonderful.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has posted a few examples of social networks, visualized. One is from University of Michigan (yay) and another is from Nielsen Buzz Metrics. They sure make pretty patterns, but as a marketer, I still can’t figure out what to do with them. Obviously, influence and linking behaviors are important to track (as Scout Labs does), but for me, a list of the most linked-to, or most influential blogs is much more useful. I’d love to have a map of a single post/story/meme and how it spreads over time, but the time-lapse element is the crucial one, there — something that these examples don’t seem to have. But I welcome your thoughts. Besides trying to look impressive, what do these fancy, all encompassing maps of linking behavior in the blogosphere help you do? Take a look Here.

The Washington Post just launched an interactive widget called the Issue Coverage Tracker that provides some nifty ways to look at intersections of people (presidential candidates in this case) and topics.

You can explore news coverage - across numerous sources - for each candidate and a range of issues, and see at a glance how each candidate ranks. For quantity of coverage overall, Hilary leads the pack, Obama is second, and the war in Iraq leads the list of issues - at least when you set the range to the last six months or so (no surprise there). However, things shift around quite a bit when you adjust the date range or choose a specific issue. For example, John McCain sits in second place if you look at overall coverage for the past year, and he’s way ahead of everyone if you look at only 2006.

True information junkies aren’t satisfied with passive consumption. They want to dig into the data, slice and dice it, measure it and mash it up. As we drive (or drift) toward a more semantic web, we can create more powerful ways for people to explore information and play with it. The issue coverage tracker does a nice job with the data and metadata that exist now.

Sometimes the Washington Post coverage tracker shows too little of a snippet or cuts it off in unfortunate places, but overall, I keep trying to find things about it I would add or change, and I’m coming up with little beyond some minor Flash glitches and incremental UI changes.

The other notable trend evinced by the Washington Post issue tracker is that they’ve widgetized it. You can embed it in a web page or blog or to add to your Facebook profile page. Very cool.

Read/Write Web posted today about next generation search, discussing some of the work that has been done with semantic search, natural language search and search agents. A new entry into what has been a fairly regular topic on R/WW is a group from the MIT media lab who have been working on something they call “goal-oriented UI for personalized semantic search.” I haven’t read the whole R/WW post yet, and I’ve only skimmed the surface of the materials produced by the MIT media lab, but it looks interesting.

One bit that doesn’t have much bearing on what we’re doing, but would be an awesome enhancement to web browsing, is the notion of a macro. These guys are proposing something that works like macros in programs like Photoshop and Microsoft Office where you can record and save a series of actions. For example, you could record the whole process of checking your bank account balance online and save it as a macro that would enable you to repeat it (play it) with one click going forward. They build on this concept and address some more complex searching and browsing use cases that involve dynamic steps and variables.

You can find the abstract here, and a collection of videos and screen shots here.

It’s called Universe and doesn’t seem quite as fininshed- lots of the suggested searches come up with empty sets. The premise is intersting- you create a “universe” for something and then you can see the items in that universe- people, places, stories, etc. Definite parallels for Scout.

The Highlights visualization on the Daylife site is also very beautiful.

The concept behind We Feel Fine - and the execution for that matter - is both rich and simple. These two qualities naturally conflict with each other, so it’s rare to find them both at work in a single piece of art, craft or engineering, and that’s the main inspiration I want to take away from WFF.

Of Jonathan Harris’ projects, my other favorite is WORDCOUNT (and it’s sister site, QUERYCOUNT). I love the way all of these encourage me to wander but also enable me to find specific things.

Another ambitious project along the same lines is 6 billion others, by French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand. It features thousands of videotaped interviews from people around the world. The navigation needs work, but you can browse individual people, countries or subjects (laughter, fears, love, dreams, etc.). There’s not much content there as of this writing, but it’s set up nicely, and I assume it will grow. I can’t wait to check back in a few months.

Via Read/Write Web

A company called ClearForest offers some interesting tools for moving toward a semantic web. Their Firefox extension, Gnosis, looks particularly interesting. It analyzes web pages and attempts to identify things like companies, geographies, people, products, technologies, industry terms, etc. Then it highlights them on the page using different colors. Even cooler, it places these items (words and phrases) in a categorized tree in a sidebar.

ClearForest provides an API for their semantic web service (SWS), which is probably worth playing with.