Information visualization has been a growing area of interest for me. My friend (and family member) over at aperte.org got me interested in information visualization when he was working on his masters thesis and developing a tool to help software developers weave together disperate information in a useful way.

Recently  blogs have also come to my attention that have some fascinating information visualizations and there seems to be more and more real applications for sharing information and ideas in this form. Here are a few of my recent favourites:

On “where does my money go?” you can see an interactive visualization of government spending in the UK. It’s an amazing way to actively engage tax payers and help citizens to understand government spending. Seems to me that governments could use tools like this to connect with people and develop new levels of transparency.

The classic information visualization from TED with Hans Rosling made me think that statistics might be incredibly interesting if only we could all get past the the numbers.

Over at the great blog, Information is beautiful I quickly and easily understood all I needed to about H1N1.

The internet is full of great visualizations of data and other information. Some of it is useful and some of it not but in bringing together art, design, and statistics information visualizations make difficult to understand concepts and overwhelming data sets something that one can understand at a glance. There is a huge opportunity for companies and governments to leverage these tools and ideas to communicate complex ideas to customers, employees, citizens and other stakeholders. Imagine a corporate annual report with financial information that even a layman could understand or a government budget we could review with a glance.

If you know of some interesting visualizations or where governments and/or companies are applying these concepts leave a comment and let me know.