IT Troubleshooter | Harper Mann » Visualization Coolness

March 13, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Visualization Coolness

TAGS: IT Community

I'm a big fan of TED (www.ted.com), inspired talks by the world's greatest thinkers and doers. Many of the talks have amazing visualizations. This one by Hans Rosling has been around for a while, but I like it a lot.

The TED talks are fascinating. While perhaps not strictly IT, they are so creative that after watching them I feel like I can solve any IT problem. At least they put IT perspective which is often helpful when solving problems. The talks have been great to share with my team and have made for great discussions and problem solving, IT or otherwise.

This one is a mash-up of Google Maps and Wikipedia, showing who is doing updates across the world. It's cool that it's real-time and updates. There seems to have been a critical mass a little time back between data collection and display. I'm seeing so many flash displays in addition to AJAX that are really re-defining how data is displayed. They are also surprisingly fast. I remember working on Motif and X Windows years ago. The web is now faster than local windows or at least the insanely great sites are.

We've always known logs are more interesting than monolithic text entries scrolling by in tail. Logs have always had relationships in them but you had to imagine them cause you couldn't see them. This really cool Real-time Log Visualization fixes that. It's fascinating to watch. It displays data linked up in ways not previously seen. I'm seeing this stuff a lot and I think it's changing how we view logs.

Here's another display of Web page usage using a different visual syntax. What interests me is the interconnectivity of various systems that can now been regarded on a single display.

Well, I'm going to go find my Tufte book and review.

Posted by Harper Mann on March 13, 2008 10:27 AM

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