For the past couple of years my colleague Alan Majer has been looking into new into new forms of interactive technology and the use of ‘gaming dashboards’ (ala World of Warcarft) in the organization. Web 2.0 tools enable employees to ‘visualize’ information in a whole new way. Widgets and Mashup are traditionally where we see visualization techniques incorporated.

I feel what differentiates visualization from a static graph or a chart is the ability or the users to manipulate and control the inputs and outputs of the tool. The first case I came across was a tool called Liveplasma and it allows users to visualize and expand their music/movie preferences by leveraging the data in the Amazon cloud. Sarah Perez at recently put up a great blog post about ‘The Best Tools for Visualization” that goes over a wide range of different tools and their uses. Continue…