The internet is abuzz today about “Visual.ly”, a website that is hoping to offer semi-automatic infographic creation to the masses.  Their webservers are a bit overloaded at the moment, but they hope to combine data from social media, open government, and other sources with graphical designs from designers like JESS3 and David McCandless into simple point-and-click tools.

Once their web servers can handle the load, the new and the already much hyped website allows access to over 2,000 different infographic illustrations, uploaded by designers like JESS3 and David McCandless, and including a large collection of own infographics. Visual.ly has already attracted key partners in publishing, design and distribution, including The Atlantic, CNNMoney.com, eBay, GOOD Magazine, OMD, National Geographic, The Next Web, and Smirnoff. Each of these publications is allowed to upload its own graphics, which can then be embedded and shared via a Visual.ly-created embed code.

If you want to try it out (and don’t mind dealing with server load), you can try out their “Twitter Visualizer”.  My results are after the break.

via Visual.ly Launches: Towards the Automatic Creation of Infographics – information aesthetics.