In the May 2008 issue of HBR, there is an interesting article titled "Emerging Graphic Tool Gets People Talking." The article points the reader to a website created by the Visual Communication Lab (part of IBM’s Collaborative User Experience research group) called Many Eyes.
Many Eyes is an interesting experiment in social sharing and conversations around visualizations. Registered users can upload a dataset, visualize it in different ways, and start or contribute to the discussion and visualizations of a topic hub. There is even a topic hub that visualizes the topic hubs in October 2007. If you have an interest in visualizing data - check out the site.
In the HBR article, the example visualization used is a Treemap - a diagram type I was first introduced to with Microsoft’s Gatineau product. Check out the Many Eyes Treemap page to understand when to use a Treemap and how they work.
The Treemap is a visual representations of hierarchical data with two metrics. The first metric is described by the size of the box, and the second metric is described by the color of the box.
If you like the Treemap diagram, you can either upload some data to the Many Eyes site or you can download the Free Excel Treemap Plug-in from Microsoft. However, if you use the Excel plug-in, you can’t participate in the conversation.
Kudos to Many Eyes for creating a social site all about visualizations.