I saw ManyEyes at LotusSphere in the labs this year and was reminded again of it when I found a link to it on this blog.

It’s a powerful tool for embedding dynamic visualisations into your site.  The most powerful feature I think, is the way that comments posted on a visualisation keep a link to the visualisation the user who commented was seeing.  This is something that could be extended into many different arenas — imagine a dynamic comment system in wordpress where you could click on a comment to see the text someone had highlighted when they made the comment etc .  Or YouTube, where users could comment with linkbacks to the footage they were specifically commenting on.  I’m sure we will see more of this.

I’ve been interested in visualisation and prediction markets for a while now, so this post from Google is right up my alley combining two areas of interest.  It’s a fascinating read if you have the time, particular the paper which Bo Cowgill, the author of the post, co-authored.

I’ll leave the blog for you to read, but I will pull out the key thing I took away and found fascinating.

1. The Power of Visualisation

There is a great heat map of a Google Office, showing how profitable trades cluster together, demonstrating the way groups of employees share knowledge.  While this is not all there is to say, it is a powerful graphic that sums up much of the article.  I’ve seen this kind of geographic heat map used in marketing type applications, layering results on to suburb level or post code level type information, but this micro-geographic use is very powerful. 

Link to the graphic (for some reason I can’t insert the image here directly properly…

In my experience employee surveys (as one example) typically break responses down by group or business unit.  While this undoubtably represents some value, what might the responses reveal if there was a heat map cluster of good and bad sentiment?  This is a powerful tool for correlating location which I suspect is an equally important part of the picture.

2. Prediction Markets are going to grow

One I’ve been looking at for a while now and really like is Inkling Markets.  My own experience of trying to evangalise a prediction market had limited success last year, but the more knowledge that enters the world from serious players like Google, the more others will want to pick these up, take them seriously and want to have a look too.

In my opinion, prediction markets are yet another tool in the rich set of collaborative tools like blogs and wikis that promote a new way of knowledge sharing; and like blogs and wikis, it will no doubt take mainstream companies a while to get their heads around it all.  Solid research like this from Google can only help ease the path for others in this regard.

Working for a firm that deals in sensitive information with clients, a recurring theme is the desire to work in the Web 2.0 world, but do so with some inherently closed walls.  For example, LinkedIn is a great tool, but is it really a contact management tool when your clients and business partners may be confidential.

IBM have released Atlas for Lotus Connections (check out Alan Lepofsky for pictures and links to the press release).   It works with your internal social profiles and build networks based on e-mail and other assets to create a graphical, LinkedIN type mesh of contacts for the internal network.

This is a big step forward for enterprises which have the size and mass to be able to leverage social tools like this internally, but can’t expose all their dealings to the external world. 

Using the API’s, a logical extension in this would be linking in CRM and Contact management systems to create a comprehensive internal marketing tool that brought together the internal and external networks that matter to large organisations. 

I’m late to catch up on this one, but here is an amazing piece of software called Trendalyzer which has been acquired by the Google monster.

Gapminder has a live example of the software in action http://www.gapminder.org/ and it’s well worth a look.  I’m fascinated to see what Google do with a powerful tool like this in their arsenal.

 Make sure that you take the time to follow the links on Gap Minder and watch Hans Roslings presentation, it both demonstrates the power of Trendalyzer (which I believe he wrote) and opens your mind and eyes to global economies.

Visualisation is coming…

I commented on a post by Fidji SIMO about visualization tools on her blog Tech IT Easy.  She shared this post with me in her comments about the Worst-3d-mailbox-ever linked here on TechCrunch.

Thanks Fidji! If that’s a sign of the future of visual mail, I think I’ll be sticking to text :-)  It’s proof that two good ideas (Visualising Data and Second Life) don’t make a great concept just by mashing them together.

After my previous post, I’ve been doing some further research on Visual Mail interfaces.  Of course, like all things Internet, spelling matters.  Once I started to use US spelling instead of British, my hit rates went up.

I’ve found several papers, some more “academic” than the previous post, none quite as visually appealing, but all trying to address similar issues.

This one on Themail is both interesting and perhaps the most relevant because not only have they built an interface, but assessed it as well.  The authors are from IBM, HP and MIT so a well credentialed team to actually make something happen here.

The following UI, Exploring Enron, was presented at an e-mail Visualization conference at UC Berkely

IBM have also done some early research back in 2003 with their Remail project, re-inventing e-mail.

Anyway, hope you enjoy looking at these.  I present them merely out of interest that there is clearly some activity going on in this space, although it’s not a deluge just yet.  My personal opinion is that undoubtably at some point in the not too distant future, a visual interface to our e-mail will be inevitable, but perhaps for now it’s a little distant.

There is something appealing in this visual mail interface anymails from Carolin Horn and Florian Jennet.  As someone who gets large amounts of e-mail every day, a new way of processing information is a great idea.  I consider myself naturally “visual” so perhaps I just “get this”, but I think that this kind of interface will become more prevalent.  There are a number of them out there – see some of the experimental offerings from Digg Labs also play with similar concepts.  Any information rich experience would benefit from a powerful visual metaphor.