Stamen Design (IDEA 2006 day 2)

Seriously, what's up with the cool stuff that everyone else (besides me) builds? Stamen Design is doing some of the coolest information design work today. Just a few of their projects include:

• Mappr - this application shows geographically-tagged Flickr photos overlain on a map of the US
  
• Cabspotting - real-time tracking of all of the cabs traveling in SF (based on GPS data), resulting in an amazingly beautiful, slowly moving (in)organic network
  
• Digg Labs - watch and interact with popular digg'd stories - the swarm visualization is particularly hypnotic

I wonder how long it will be before individuals start integrating these sorts of visualizations as artworks in their homes - creating art out of information which is meaningful to them. Am I the only one who wants to hang an LCD monitor connected to the Web that displays real-time data like this?

Collaborative exploration of info viz is also something Fernanda Viegas (of IBM's Visual Communication Lab) is working on. She showed an interesting demo of a collaborative information visualization tool where individuals can save "views" into the data and comment on it so other individuals can also view interesting patterns in the data they might find. This could be invaluable for groups working collaboratively with large data sets - and Viegas suggested that these sort of sites could also "enable conversation or storytelling" around these data.