Digging Digg

I hadn’t been to the Digg Labs area in a while. Wow. They have a won­der­ful assort­ment of story picture-2.pngand 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.

4 Responses

  1. Geoffrey R. says:
    21 November 2007 at 00:56

    There is some­thing addict­ive about watch­ing live visu­al­iz­a­tion. It isn’t just the visu­al­iz­a­tion so much as how it changes and matures that is intriguing. What might be the lit­er­ary or his­tor­ical research equivalent?

  3. shawnday says:
    21 November 2007 at 19:23

    @Josh: I do think the com­mut­ing data rep­res­ent­a­tion is quite unclear and was wor­ried when I hit the site and that was the first one dis­played. Then I saw the day/night pop­u­la­tion shift…that is very clear and well imple­men­ted. The hap­pi­ness scale is just plain fun. I will have to see where that can go. Great ref­er­ence. Thanks.

  4. shawnday says:
    21 November 2007 at 19:26

    @Geoffrey: I think that there might be a very fun lit­er­ary one and I will see what throw­ing com­put­ing power at it can deliver. As to his­tor­ical … this is a very inter­est­ing view of time…changes the per­cep­tion of chro­no­logy. The ques­tion, and the one I con­stantly have to ask myself, is will this visu­al­iz­a­tion allow me to see that I oth­er­wise might miss.

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