A Directory of Visualizing Tools

By | November 22, 2011
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Update Feb 2007: Just came across some cool stuff from digg labs (the guys behind digg) who haev some coold stuff I’ve added below.

In this week’s WSJ.com column I wrote (subscription only, I’m afraid) about treemaps, tools which allow you to look at data differently:

One of the things that bugs me about our oh-so-cool information revolution is this: We show such little imagination in how we actually look at that information. Think about it. We have all this fascinating data at our fingertips and yet we have decided the most effective way of viewing it is in…a table. Or a chart. Or a list of search results (“1.7 gazillion matches — click here for next 10 results”). There has to be a better way.

A treemap “is a bunch of squares, arranged to form a mosaic. The size and color of each block mean something”. It’s probably easier to show it than to explain it:

Treemap
(from RoomforMilk, see below)

The size of blocks indicate, in this case, the popularity of each subject, shades and color indicate how recent the topic has been updated. Click on one and more information appears. Best is to check them out: they’re intuitive and fun to use. Really.

Here’s some links (yes I know this should be in the form of a treemap, but I’m not that clever) from the column and some stuff I wasn’t able to put in for reasons of space (Yes, I am aware of the irony. Yell at my editor): 

  • stack a vertical bar chart of activity, with the stories themselves moving way too fast down the screen (from digg labs)
  • digg’s bigspy an impressive scrolling list of stories, size dictated by the number of diggs.
  • swarm another digg offering. not sure what this does, actually, but it looks cute.
  • Panopticon a leading supplier of professional Visual Business Intelligence to the financial services industry as well as other fields of business. Download their free Panopticon Explorer .NET Learning Edition which lets you view treemaps of files, processes, event logs and spreadsheets.
  • Marcus Weskamp’s excellent newsmap
  • Peet’s Coffee Selector good example of a treemap at work for consumers
  • RoomforMilk lovely looking treemap of Slashdot headlines, or as the website puts it — “RoomforMilk.com is a news feed pasteurizer and homogenizer featuring Slashdot News Headlines. RoomforMilk is not even 2% affiliated with Slashdot.org.” Colors and shades indicate new/old (fresh/stale) stories, blocks indicate keywords.
  • del.icio.us most popular treemap from codecubed very cool-looking map of the most popular links from social bookmarking tool del.ico.us, by derek gottfrid.
  • Microsoft Treemapper with Excel Add-In. Simple tool “to view hierarchical data conveniently from an Excel file.”
  • Wikipedia World Population in a treemap by The Hive Group, as a demonstration of their Honeycomb technology. Very absorbing. Check out their views of iTunes’ Top 100 and Amazon.
  • NewsIsFree also uses Honeycomb.
  • CNET News’ Hot page.
  • Great recent piece by Ben Shneiderman, inventor of the treemap. Didn’t get to talk to him but I hope to at some point.
  • Wikipedia entry on Treemapping.
  • Grokker search, a kind of treemap. (Thanks to a reader of the column for that.)
  • WSJ’s Map of the Market, from SmartMoney. Uses Java, but pretty cool.

And, some software to visualize your hard drive (Windows, unless stated)

  • FolderSizes strictly speaking not really a treemap, but a good way to visualize your drives via pie charts. “It can quickly isolate large, old, temporary, and duplicate files, or even show file distribution by type, attributes, or owner. All with multiple export formats, command-line support, shell context menu integration, and much more.” $40, free trial.
  • SizeExplorer Features include folder size, graphical charts, file distribution statistics and reports (by size, extension, type, owner, date, etc.), biggest files, network support, snapshots, file management, printing of file listing, compress into ZIP file, exports to Excel, html, xml and text files, etc. $16-45
  • DiskView another pie chart approach, but useful. DiskView integrates into your Windows Explorer, pretty well. New version also indicates how fragmented files are , and, if your hard disk supports it, its health
  • SpaceMonger my favorite space-hogger hunter. Does a great job of mapping your hard drives and showing you what is taking up space. New version out soon, I’m told.
  • DiskAnalyzer Similar to FolderSizes, though not as pretty. Free tho.
  • WinDirStat free program which will create a treemap of your drive(s), based on the KDirStat for the K Desktop Environment, an interface for UNIX.
  • DiskInventory X similar to WinDirStat/KDirStat, for Macs
  • SequoiaView similar to the above. Linked to the company MagnaView, which sells commercial versions of its treemapping software “take input from virtually any information system, file or database, and support the development of an impressive range of visualizations”. (thanks, Michael.)

You can also see a bunch of posts I’ve done on different kinds of newsmaps, including some interviews with folk like Marcus Weskamp and Craig Mod, creator of Buzztracker, here. I’m sure I’ve missed lots; please do let me know either by email or comments.

 
 

Skype’s 100 Million: Where The Hell Are They?

By | November 22, 2011
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Internet telephony folks Skype today says that it now has 100 million registered users. A press release (free registration required) says that this was achieved in “just two-and-a-half year’s time [sic], and has nearly doubled in size from September 2005 when it had 54 million registered users.” This is truly impressive. But if this is the case, where the hell is everyone?

My Skype currently shows 3,633,607 users online. Admittedly this is during the Asian day, when traffic is not as high as when the Europeans and Americans wake up. But that’s less than 4% of registered users actually online. OK, allowing for people who are ‘away’ (I believe this excludes them from being counted) and for folk who only go online occasionally, and allowing for the vagaries of actually reporting the total number of users online (actually, another 6,000 users have appeared since I started writing this paragraph), I can’t help wondering whether the 100 million figure is a) a wild exaggeration, down to people registering twice, b) people registering and then ditching it or c) the number of users that appears in the Skype program is just not reflecting reality.

No question Skype is big. And good: Everyone I know has it, some of them people who have resisted the Internet age on an almost Luddite scale. But I just wonder where all those tens of millions of people are. What’s the biggest number we’ve seen online? Anyone seen more than 10 million in one go?

The “Sharing Files Thing” Gets Cheaper

By | November 22, 2011
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It’s a growing space, as the marketing types call it, and it’s not surprising that Laplink, best known for their linking of laps (shurely “laptops”? – ed), have decided to make the basic edition of their file sharing applications, ShareDirect, free. Previously available online for $40, the program can now be downloaded for nothing. It’s not a bad application — you just invite trusted contacts to view and download them from the folders you designate. “The files never leave the safety of your hard drive until you invite someone to download them from you directly. All files are protected by 128-bit encryption, and can securely travel through existing firewall settings,” as the blurb would have it.

The free version will allow unlimited ordinary transfers and 500 MB per month of what Laplink calls ’Premium Transfers’. These are transfers that pass through Laplink’s own servers without any need for altering your firewall and other connection settings. The Plus version, costing $70, lets you make 5 GB a month worth of Premium Transfers.

It doesn’t surprise me because Microsoft recently bought FolderShare and made that available for nothing. I’m working on a review of these various services so watch this space. Well, actually, this space.

A Modular Packing Expert Speaks

By | November 22, 2011
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Today’s podcast is given over to an interview with my old friend Jim, further identity concealed, as we catch him via Skype on mission in the southern Sudan and ask him, not about the tense political situation and his efforts to bolster democracy in that troubled country, but about how he packs his underpants. Anyone with an interest in packing, or even in Jim’s underpants, should take a listen. Quality of recording unsurprisingly poor despite the great efforts of Skype recording tool Skylook.
Here’s the podcast (about 2 MB): Loose Wireless on Modular Packing I

Data That Blows Up in Your Face

By | November 22, 2011
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Great idea, this one: A USB flash drive that looks like a balloon (or a handbag) and that changes size depending on how much space there is left on the drive (via the excellent infosthetics and randomly good stuff:

When empty the flashbag is small, like a sack, and then it balloons up as stuff is added, alerting the owner that it’s time to get another one or shift some stuff. What isn’t quite clear is what happens when it’s full. The blurb suggests a violent end:

When the device is about to blow up you will see the familiar error message on your screen: “There is not enough free space”.

I think the author, designer Dima Komissarov, may not quite mean that, although it does have interesting implications for data storage. People might be a bit more careful with what they load onto their storage devices if excessive downloading brings the risk of explosion. Might be worth honing the concept before it hits the shelves.