I was first introduced to IBM’s new Manyeyes project when Fernanda Viegas spoke about it at Adaptive Path’s excellent IDEA conference in Seattle back in October. We presented too; it was a “morning of visualization” 🙂 .
Since it launched, the site has deservedly gotten a ton of attention and seems to be growing every day. The focus on “democratization of visualization” is absolutely right on. What clinches the site’s utility for me is that it allows you to basically screencap the particular way you’re looking at the data, so what you make can be shared and referenced.
Visualization (and flash and java generally) have been historically terrible at this aspect of things; data flows through, the framework responds, you get it looking just great, and then… you’re done, unless you want to take a screengrab, post it to flickr, yadda yadda yadda…and then you lose the ability to interact with the data and draw your own conclusions. The chain of reasoning gets broken any time you try and do anything with the material. Manyeyes solves this problem by generating thumbnails of whatever aspect of the data you’re looking at, and provides links back to the original data, so you can make your own graphings; it’s just great. This ability to handle a specific slice of visualized data is becoming more and more of an interest to us here at Stamen; look for more on time and visualization here in the next few months.