BuzzData has posted the first piece in a series on “What makes a good visualization”, starting with a focus on Microsoft’s “Pivot“.
Personally speaking, I think both McKinney and Garkusha were homing in on one central point about creating data visualizations — the most telling criterion of a “good” or “bad” viz is whether or not it’s apparent the creator considered what is relevant (or worth learning) in their data, for whom, and of course, which design or tool is the right way to communicate it.
It’s a bit meandering, but seems to be trying to get to the crux of “How do you quantify what makes a visualization good?” A good start to what will hopefully be an interesting series.
Over at the “Internet Evolution” blog, Rob Salkowitz talks about that fun little piece of Microsoft Technology ‘Pivot’ that first appeared around a year ago. It’s a neat interactive way to view data that shows a lot of promise, but hasn’t really materialized in any large way. He wonders why, and breaks it down to the fate of Microsoft’s LiveLabs division.
LiveLabs was insulated from Office groupthink and politics, but also from the unit’s enormous clout as Microsoft’s cash-cow. Consequently, LiveLabs proved a real-life demonstration of the cartoon where the mad scientist comes out of his lab and says, “Eureka! The experiment is a success! Unfortunately, the subject died.”
He then laments the failure and how this product will never come to light.
It’s been 6 months since Microsoft first demonstrated their new visualization tool ‘Pivot’, but now it’s finally publicly available and free for all at their website.
The Silverlight PivotViewer makes it easier to interact with massive amounts of data on the web in ways that are powerful, informative, and valuable. PivotViewer lets us present thousands of things at once and visualize them in a way that exposes value from the group. PivotViewer experiences range in complexity to build. All involve the creation of a collection. PivotViewer is now available for you to begin building and embedding your collections directly onto your webpage.
They offer the offering software for free download, and it supports the ability to publish and embed your visualizations into the websites of your choosing.
Infosthetics points us to a recent TED Talk from Gary Flake, technical fellow at Microsoft, where he demonstrates their new “Pivot” technology. Based on the Seadragon technology, it offers views of an immense quantity of data with very nice and smooth zooming & multiresolution features.
“Right now, in this world, we think about data as being this curse, we talk about the curse of information overload, drowning in data. What if we can turn that upside down, so that instead of navigating from one thing to the next, we get used to the habit of being able to go from many things to many things and then being able to see the patterns that were otherwise hidden.”
BuzzData has posted the first piece in a series on “What makes a good visualization”, starting with a focus on Microsoft’s “Pivot“.
Over at the “Internet Evolution” blog, Rob Salkowitz talks about that fun little piece of Microsoft Technology ‘Pivot’ that 
It’s been 6 months since Microsoft
Infosthetics points us to a recent TED Talk from Gary Flake, technical fellow at Microsoft, where he demonstrates their new “Pivot” technology. Based on the Seadragon technology, it offers views of an immense quantity of data with very nice and smooth zooming & multiresolution features.
VizWorld.com 
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