I found this article that features several different forms of data visualization that might be of interest to a colleague (or it might be on the basic side for her). Some of these are just funny little web 2.0 “mashups” (wincing as I use that word). A few I’ve actually seen before, but one I actually might look at from time-to-time.

Newsmap is a site that matches the font and space used by an article on the page to its popularity on Google News. The bigger the rectangle and size of the font, the more popular that article is. This would be incredibly cool as a widget. Also cool would be keyword filters to then be able to visualize which stories on a certain topic get the most traffic.

Seeing this reminded me that I should get the appropriate tool that displays the contents of my hard drive like this. (Which comes native with the Linux KDE desktop.) Lifehacker wrote a great post reviewing several of these a while back.