I hadn’t been to the Digg Labs area in a while. Wow. They have a won­der­ful assort­ment of story and author visu­al­iz­a­tion tools avail­able there that are both mes­mer­iz­ing and thought pro­vok­ing. Navel gaz­ing is a won­der­ful past-time and methinks that Digg is mak­ing a con­cer­ted effort at per­fect­ing the art. I am par­tic­u­larly attrac­ted to the new Arc tool. Its shows story pop­ular­ity in real­time and also makes a link between stor­ies dugg by the same users. Thicker vec­tors indic­ate story pop­ular­ity. Inter­est­ing.
The Stac visu­al­iz­a­tion is also extremely cool. A col­lec­tion of stor­ies rep­res­en­ted by bars of varyiong shades based on pop­ular­ity spread across the bot­tom of the screen and then as they are dugg, weight blocks fall from above rein­for­cing the story title. Just neat. And as before far to mes­mer­iz­ing.
Its a quick way to gauge pop­ular­ity and user activ­ity. The anim­a­tion is smooth and enter­tain­ing. Pop­u­lar of course has noth­ing to do with my interest or rel­ev­ance, but the visu­al­iz­a­tion is effect­ive in con­vey­ing the info and it does make a fine screensaver. Apple’s new RSS visu­al­izer in Leo­pard is another cool infofeed screensaver. Visu­ally stunning.