VentureBeat’s Chikodi Chima throws his name into the many people claiming that the infographics bubble is bursting thanks to the overwhelming number of “junk infographics” flooding the internet. Infographics, or visualizing data, is still useful tho:
We live in an era of big data, where our every action spins off gigabits of information, both meaningful and mundane. Our computers, phones, and browsing habits leave behind trails of data exhaust that can be sifted and recombined to give us better search results, improved movie recommendations, or ways for marketers to serve up more relevant advertisements. But at the end of the day, it’s still just data. For those of us who don’t actually enjoy gazing at columns of digits, we need someone to make sense of it all, preferably in soothing colors and with non-threatening images. That’s why data visualization can be so comforting, and why it has become so popular of late.
Unfortunately, so few of them actually do this:
The most egregious examples of bad infographics are simply pictures with a few numbers attached, or a chronology of events peppered with commentary. They’re disappointing, contain minimal insight, and offer little that you couldn’t get from a simple text timeline. They are also hard to avoid. And this is why many feel the Internet infographics trend has run amok.
They also have some good quotes from Nathan Yau, describing how infographics have moved from actual data visualization tools to just SEO tools replacing blog posts, hence the many narrow-but-extremely-long images that are becoming so common.
