I’ve been seeing a lot of amazing infographics and visualizations. I was at a conference presented by Actuate the BI company. They presented a talk on visualizations in part because of purchasing a company to help compete with products like Tableau whose product helps visualizing data. In the discussion was d3 a javascript html5 library, which sites like The New York Times uses to do some of the wonderful graphics they do. You can see from the samples gallery some of the amazing things you can do with it. If you have good skills with Css and Javascript, you can create very dynamic graphics for projects you are working on.
You can see to the left a clip from a project I have been working on in my free time. During the period leading up to the elections I was working on a project to capture twitter data during the debates and later build hadoop jobs to crunch the data and reduce it down to data. The sample to the left from the town hall debate is from the source data, top 100 sources, which represents the twitter clients that people were using with the larget text representing the most used clients. These used a word cloud type visualization, which is hard to draw conclusions from it, though you can pick out the important information. The data needed to be scaled from a range of approximately 30:58000, so I scaled using log10(n/500).