Digg Pics is a dynamic visualization of images as people vote for them.
Generally, when we work on a new visualization, we start with data that is already flowing, and look for interesting patterns or tendencies that already exist. In Digg’s case, this is usually a particularly fruitful process because of the tremendous volume and interconnectedness of the data that flows through the site every day.
When it came time to visualize Digg’s newly launched images section, though, we found ourselves needing to get started on it before the section was live and running. So we had to improvise. We decided to use images from ffffound.com, an image bookmarking service that we use alot around the studio, as a source for the images, and use general Digg traffic as the source for the continuous flow of interrelated content that people care about.
We started off by taking a look at the spread in the number of diggs that we could expect, and dynamically sizing and placing the images accordingly:
