Smashing Magazine has an interesting article on avant garde information presentation.  If you're interested in cool ways to present numbers and relationships... check out  "Data Visualization: Modern Approaches".

A multi-level, relational visualization.  It's been done before but this is a nice presentation.

Check out the demos at http://www.touchgraph.com.

While looking for some information on web analytics I came across Hurol Inan's site.  It's worth a look, there you'll find straight-forward definitions of web analytics and related jargon as well as links to resources.   

When Ian was in Brussels last week he spent some time showing off the new product.  Eric Peterson posted a copy of the slide deck on Web Analytics Demystified Friday, you should go check them out.

Another reason to go check out the link is it includes screen shots of thee of the visualizations being built here in Dublin by the European arm of the Gatineau team: the campaign, path an treemap visualizations (The treemap screen shot happens to show web traffic to my blog :)). 

Like many out there, my entire context for web site traffic is publishing content.  Since I don't sell any products I have no conversion to measure.  So, what's a blog author to do?

Avinash has a great article measures you should monitor if you are a content publisher.  It's a great read with tips to help publishers measure and understand their traffic.  If you have Google Analytics already running on your site you can walk through the article along with Avinash.  If you don't have GA on your site... perhaps you need to sign up for the Gatineau beta instead. ;)

Link: I Got No Ecommerce. How Do I Measure Success? » Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik

Like many Hollywood A-list celebrities, Tufte's talent is debated in many circles.  There is, however, no debating the influence he's had on data visualization and his books are must-buys for anyone in the field.

Tufte's books are a visual feast with well-written analysis of visualization from across history.  The information about Tufte himself, however, is limited to what you find on the book jacket.  New York Magazine has solved that information gap.

If you're a Tufte admirer, dig in.  If you scorn his work, know thy enemy.  It's a good read regardless.

Article: The Minister of Information

The Minister of Information
If this messy world is becoming easier to understand, thank Edward Tufte.

Edward Tufte is most likely the world’s only graphic designer with roadies. “We own two of everything—amplifiers, digital projectors,” other A/V gear, he says. “One set moves up and down the West Coast, and one stays in the East, to keep the FedEx charges down.” He plays 35 or so dates a year, at $380 per ticket. Today’s is in a raddled old auditorium on 34th Street, over the Hammerstein Ballroom.

[Continued on nymag.com]

Article link via Jorge Comoe's BizViz blog.

Here’s an interesting one from Avinash Kaushik describing his current favourite six data visualizations.  It’s a great read as he does a great job of describing his top visualizations as well as enumerating why each of them works.

Microsoft's acquisition of aQuantive for a whopping $6 billion last week left some people scratching their heads.  Kim Peterson's article in the Seattle Times has a good summary of aQuantive's pieces.  The question remains, however, what's the attraction for Microsoft?

Eyeballs. 

The Internet went through a phase where all the smart people said subscriptions were king.  Slate was subscription-based and the always-free Hotmail had a premium service with extra storage.  Times, however, are a-changin' and the Internet is now about ad-funding. 

Scoble weighed in on the topic and has a generally positive spin on the acquisition as it relates to the Internet for brand awareness.  Another way to look at it is this: in order to get a really strong foothold in the online advertising world Microsoft could have considered a purchase of Yahoo! for around $50 billion.  If the $6 billion spent on aQuantive is a successfully launching pad it will be a bargain at almost one-tenth the price.  That is, however, a big IF.

Daniel Gross at Slate talks about it at length and comes to the conclusion that Microsoft paid top dollar for aQuantive.  One thing of interest, however, he doesn't say Microsoft overpaid.  Will it be worth it in the end?  Only time will tell.

Amazon.com is working on a new feature which will automatically create contextual links on web sites.  It will be interesting to see how effective this is.

Traditionally a blog author would create content for their page and selectively link text to a product they were reviewing (pushing, pimping, whatever).  Since Amazon is going to be linking product automatically and looking for "the contextually relevant phrases with the highest monetization value and closest match to Amazon products" pages are going marked up based on individual words, not the context in which they are presented.  This indiscriminate linking is going to create a flood of up-sell pollution which will make the product useless.

To try out the new beta I added Amazon's script to my personal web site and let it do its thing.  The first link it produced for me was wildly off topic for the blog post and left me wondering if this is going to make me money or turn off my readers.  The blog post was a long, somewhat uninspired, discussion of Star Wars plot holes (it was a long lead in to a lame joke, but I digress).  The one thing it chose to link in the post was "Saint Patrick's" (linked to a book about Ireland).  Wouldn't you think all of the Star Wars references should have triggered at least one DVD or soundtrack link?  If they had, it would have been much more likely to prompt a click from a reader, I'm sure.

The only thing one can do to possibly increase relevance at this point in time is to use the advanced settings to eliminate topics which might not seem appropriate for your site (e.g. I never talk about "Clothing & Accessories" on my personal blog).  While eliminating some topics could reduce your false positives, it's definitely not a cure.  The bad link in my example came from the "Books & Text Media" category... and I wouldn't want to remove that category because I do occasionally discuss books (though that's about as often as I read them).

Adam Fields has an interesting article describing how some ISPs may be selling information on web traffic. 

Link to Adam Fields (weblog) - » ISPs apparently sell your clickstream data - entertaining hundreds of millions of eyeball atoms every day

The anual study done by the Irish Independent and the Great Place To Work Institue is out and Microsoft Ireland has been ranked as one of the top ten places to work in Ireland.  If you'd like to find out more you can find the full list and study methodology on the Best Companies website.

From that I smootly segue into: we're hiring!  The Windows Live Europe team is currently looking for senior developer and program management talent.  Drop me a line if you're interested (or know someone who is).

Chris Harrison has built an interesting presentation of search data: the Magellan Voyeur Data Visualization.  The data, gathered based on time of day, is presented as if on a 24-hour clock face.  Top search terms from each hour are presented radially out from the hour, grouped by year.

The presentation is interesting, but I find it a little hard to read.  The thing that stands out in the visualization is the repetition of words, year to year, in the same time slot.  The data was gathered every ten minutes, for a period of five years.  It's a very interesting commentary on the consistency of human behavior. 

This makes me wonder if a similar technique could be used to graphically show relative data for each hour.  Hmm... [wanders off to a sketch pad].