Blog: Pete Loshin

« How Walkable is Your House? | Main | Using Eclipse for Development, and Web 2.0 Rave »

More Data Visualization for Web 2.0

The past few years we've seen a huge flood of heavy-duty software tools being made available to anyone with a PC through the magic of open source software. Combine that with hundreds of millions of people getting connected to the global Internet and the growing tide of social-networking/web 2.0 applications chock full of database goodness, and you've got a hotbed of new activity and new creativity.

The art and science of database management and business intelligence is hardly new, and many mistakenly believe it to be a boring realm of reports based on decades-old mainframe greenbar printouts. In fact, though, there's more new and exciting developments in the field than ever.

Consider data visualization: if you think it's all (and only) about the same boring old pie charts and bar graphs that you've been doing since Visicalc days, think again. You can read about 16 Awesome Data Visualization Tools at the Mashable Social Networking News blog. You could easily spend a week exploring and fiddling around with all the tools mentioned here, and not a pie or bar chart in a carload.

The stunning thing is that all of these tools for visualization are used to distill the essence of information from sometimes vast quantities of data. Kind of what the business information business is all about. So even if you don't care about Web 2.0, you can learn a lot from it anyway.

Share: