Digg Visualisation Tools
Some time ago, Ian pointed me at a video of two new visualisation tools (Stack and Swarm) that have been developed for Digg. Now that they’re both live (on Digg Labs) I wanted to give them a mention.
Stack is a visualisation tool, showing ‘diggs’ as they occur in real-time. Taking the form of a bar chart, vertical bars along the bottom grow, as blocks (representing ‘diggs’) fall from above. Visually, it feels like an early 80′s video game, and the default zoom level tends to yield little in the way of information. Clicking on a bar (which at the lowest zoom level, requires the manual dexterity and speed associated with playing a video game) gives you a more detailed view on the respective story. Interesting stuff!
Swarm is definitely the approach that I find most interesting. As a real-time visualisation tool, it affords far more information at a glance. Individual stories are represented as circles, growing in size as they grow in popularity. Hovering over a circle reveals not only the headline, but connections (or lackof) to other stories – arcs temporarily appear to illustrate relationships between items as the user moves them.
There’s a nice application of physics employed in the visualisation – ‘loner’ stories push adjacent stories away whilst connected items have elastic connections (causing a lag in movement that’s dependent on the speed with which objects are moved). I did initially find myself questioning the value of some of the interactions. Moving items around seemed to have little purpose beyond sheer playfulness, and any attempt to organise items in the constantly fluid state is futile. That said, I have to concede that the interaction does help the user grasp the relationship (or lackof) between objects in a way that visual stimulus alone, would not.
As real-time visualisations of data go, both approaches are very impressive.
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