My year in attention (and yours)
By Chris Gemignani
December 12, 2005
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Jon Udell has put together a demo showing how (ahem) easy it is with standard business tools to create a dynamic visualization of your data. Result: it took a handfull of different tools and two different programming languages to show the evolution of his interests via del.icio.us. That's like asking a weekend duffer to shoot par at Augusta. It's completely beyond reasonable expectations--success takes skill in not just one but multiple areas.
We're able to do a little more with Excel than Jon and we're happy to present the dynamic del.icio.us tag cloud viewer. This Excel tool downloads your delicious links and creates an animation that shows the evolution of your attention over the course of the year. Download the tool and try it on your own delicious history.
To see it in action, here's a screencast showing the evolution of my attention over the course of the year.
We appreciate Jon's perspective; business analytics is a mess. Visualization and animation is possible in theory but not in common practice.
Unfortunately, with more and richer data becoming available to business analysts, the need to answer ad-hoc questions on semi-structured data is becoming the common case. We hoping 2006 brings tools that open up ad-hoc data exploration, visualization and animation to a wide audience. We'll be doing our part--stay tuned.
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5 comments
David said:
Who says visualization and animation are only in theory? Quintura developers offer smth alike - a dynamic social tagcloud in real time.
Chris said:
I had trouble deciding whether to moderate the comment above as spam. Quintura offers a dynamic visualization of search as a cloud. However, it is not a "dynamic social, real-time tagcloud". Commenters, if you're looking to highlight a product, please, please don't oversell.
Trevor Lohrbeer said:
I'm having trouble on the other side. Our company just launched a data visualization product and since we're a small startup with almost no marketing budget, I'm trying to find appropriate ways to make people aware of it. Blogs make sense, but it sometimes feels cheesy.
Coming from the "other side", the rules I'm developing for our company when highlighting a product on a blog are:
1) If the blog highlights different visualization techniques / software, e-mail the owner and let them decide whether to highlight our product or not. Don't just add a comment to a random post announcing your product.
2) Contribute relevant content to the blog. If all you can say is, "here check out my product", then it's probably not relevant. However, if you can say, "with our software you can animate weighted tags over time", and the post is about animating weighted tags over time, then it's probably relevant.
3) Subscribe to all blogs posted on so you can reply to any additional comments made. If the blog doesn't have an RSS feed, then at least check back a couple days later to see if you need to continue the discussion.
There are, of course, a work in progress and I would be interested to hear any additions or refinements.
BTW, our product has nothing to do with tag cloud visualization and is guilty of having no animation capabilities.
Ian said:
This is neat. Although, I feel like seeing things on a line graph plotted over time is easier to take in. For example, when I see the frames around June/July, I cannot remember what they looked like in January, or even if there was a January.
It is interesting though
Jason May's blog said:
<strong>Tag cloud animation is not an effective visualization...</strong>
The Juice Analytics blog shows a Flash movie of an Excel animation of their tag cloud, building on an earlier attempt by Jon Udell.
This is cute, but it isn’t a really effective visualization of the information. Since the tag cloud is just a li...
said:
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