Swimming in Data
A common lament of the naughties is that we are drowning in data. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could swim instead of drown? I have recently become aware of a new data visualization tool called Pivot, developed by Microsoft Live Labs.
It is able to create and access data collections from very large data bases, including particularly web information and pages. Rather than simply searching the data, it allows you to quickly zoom in with respect to one variable, link with respect to another, zoom out with respect to another so that subtler patterns in the data may emerge.
The idea is that even though we talk about the web, we do not browse it like a web. We browse it one-dimensionally from page to page. Microsoft have even produced a web-browser based on the same technology which allows you to organized you browsing history in interesting ways.
Gary Fluke, one of the developers, gives a great demonstration at one of my favourite websites (TED). You can download the movie here (12Mb). Though I really wonder whether it would work at anything like the same speed on my humble office PC. Well, why not test it yourself? The software is feely available. Just go here. The only catch is that you have to be running Windows 7, which ubnfortunately I am not. If any of you good folks are able to test drive Pivot yourselves, I would love to hear of your impressions.
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