Anyone who knows me also knows that I am inordinately interested in information graphics, as in tables, charts, maps, and so forth. In homage to this particular aspect of my nerdself, I’m breaking my long “holiday” blogging silence (which has largely consisted of writing my book-fingers to the bone) and welcoming the new year with a guest post over at Library Journal’s Stacking the Tech column. The article describes a residual effect of Twitter’s 2009 ascendancy – the increased popularity of information visualization:
Twitter and the Visual Dataverse
Sorry to disappoint, but this year-end review column is not about how Twitter “conquered the world in 2009.” To be sure, Twitter played its part as the emerging technology darling of 2009, and it would be hard to overlook the 140-character behemoth’s startlingly rapid influence on web-based communication. Trending and real-time searchability have achieved social, organizational, and commercial utility to a degree and diversity unrivaled by any other social media platform, save maybe Facebook. Twitter provides libraries with myriad creative outreach applications and encourages what in my own experience can be wildly productive professional backchannel discourse. Plus, now that Oprah Winfrey and David Lynch are both updating regularly, the site might as well be canonized in the popculturium…
Read on, if you are so inclined. And for those interested, here a few beautiful visualization blogs:
info-mational 
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