Seeing sites like re.vu, and vizualize.me makes me really happy. I am glad these sites and many, many more simple to use sites that makes data and information come alive exists. You can even use these tools that imports data from other popular (social) sites as quick tools for making your own fast, but really cool presentation for any other subject. Think of LinkedIn as a placeholder for the timeseries of your choice and map in the special widgets picking info from LinkedIns different slots for information. That is a fast way to make cool interactive infographics for a presentation of any business situation.

But it isn’t just pretty, it is also got well designed UX, trendy images, theme choices and simpler forms of customisations, just to the right point where the user still got the energy to customize. These things together makes people use their data and share it. This is the really great thing. The data doesn’t just sit there, forgotten on some old harddrive. The data lives – it is questioned, referred to, discussed, shared and updated. I really like that and hope to see even more online tools, using other kinds of data than just social, like this in the future. Alot of us likes to make our own software, but some things are just more handy (and less time consuming) to get served. And well served is the general direction.

Related article on these tools on lostmyjob.ca

I was really baffled by Jörgens triagrams and their simplicity and look forward to get going on showing some quadragrams together with Jörgen soon. Bertin keeps coming up as a fundamental I still haven’t caught up on.

The feedback on the experiments on the graphs I played with using Jung incorporated in Processing was good and healthy. I really need a good real-world case to test my gut instinct on the effectiveness of my twisting the algorithms. I still feel there is something really good is lurking in them.

The strategic foresight panel Jonas spoke about gives me hope for some good government funding for visualization in general in sweden and hope they keep their good work going.

Great, or not so great for that matter as well, new visualisations that make me wonder and get interested in the data or information lying behind. These things inspire me immensly. Like http://hint.fm/luscious/warm-glow.html. No idea what the use is meant to be, but it gets me thinking, and lures me in to think of the use we could have, like in corporate communications differentiation situations and the thoughts rumble on. http://benfry.com/genomevalence/ is also one of those things you just cannot rub out of your head. No idea how to read it or even begin to approach the information. But completely to die for and inspirational in a fundamentally mindboggling way.

So I guess what really gets me going is the bright new ones with no obvious reason for existing until the user or situation makes the reason appear. Out of nothing.

Just a simple thing as learning it all: http://processing.org/learning/

The wonderful books http://processing.org/learning/books/

The inspirational work of others http://processing.org/exhibition/, http://www.openprocessing.org/, http://www.vimeo.com/tag:processing.org, http://www.youtube.com/group/processing

The endless discussions in this excellent community where even boring problems becomes fascinating http://processing.org/discourse/yabb2/YaBB.pl

Experimental solutions come into light http://processing.org/hacks/

Processing has inspired me more than any other platform so far, apart from typography in general. Processing stands for creativity in the rawest of formats. Amazing, inspirational, mindbending, attention altering and simply wonderful.