Robert Kosara takes a close look at the “Many Eyes” project, trying to figure out if it’s still going strong or dying on the vine.  Since the leaders of the project left a few years ago, I have to admit I haven’t thought about it much nor have I heard much news.  His critical analysis seems to indicate a few major problems that could be leading to the site’s slow decline.

Not only are people making mistakes, the lack of collaboration on the site means that few people pick up others’ datasets to create visualizations from, which would increase the number of visualizations per dataset. The idea of social data visualization was that somebody would dig up some data, and then many people could easily create visualizations from it. That isn’t happening on Many Eyes, though. As I was developing my scraper, I saw several copies of Obama’s State of the Union speech appear. The people who were uploading it apparently never checked if that data was already there, but just uploaded their own version. The result is that the majority of datasets that has any visualizations at all has exactly one. Datasets with more than one view on them are quite rare, while a clear majority of datasets has no views at all.

Quo Vadis, Many Eyes? | eagereyes.