I love numbers. I also love data visualization – Edward Tufte has long been one of my intellectual heros and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information remains one of my all time favorite books. My friends at FeedBurner delighted me today with Feedstorm – the visual (and audible) display of the growth of the feeds on their service. Their viewer’s guide is as follows:
- Blue drops represent text feeds, orange drops are podcasts.
- The placement and position of the drops are random.
- The pace at which the drops drop is representative of the general growth curve of all FeedBurner-managed feeds mapped to our actual dataset.
- There are roughly 1,200 drops from start to finish, so imagine that number times 200 for a sense of the actual scale.
- The larger drops are mapped to the emergence of the most highly subscribed feeds.
- Turn on your audio to get a better sense for the initially sparse and then rapidly growing number of rich media feeds.
It’s worth a look and a listen if you like data and creative ways to visualize it.