Awesome ways to display data

I looked at Gapminder a few months ago, after a mention by Tim O'Reilly (whose post also points to the excellent Worldmapper). 

But today, through a recent blog post by the data geeks at Swivel, I got a pointer to a video of Hans Rosling presenting his awesome visualizations at the February 2006 TED conference.  (It's 20 minutes, but well worth the time!).

Apparently after Hans Rosling's presentation at TED, Gapminder was invited to do a longer presentation at Google.  Then Google stepped up to host the Gapminder site (and presumably to sponsor their work).

By the way, if you are interested in data but not familiar with Swivel, check them out.  I'm looking forward to Swivel becoming the Flickr and YouTube of data.  All they need is some of Hans Rosling's technology.  :-)

Comments

[Brian Mulloy]

One of the remarkable things about gapminder is it allows one to display 4 dimensions of data on a 2-d screen (for example: x is fertility, y is life expectancy, size of circle is population, and animation gives time ). That is very powerful. And it's shocking how data comes to life and tells its own story during the presentation.

At Swivel we're going to take things 2 dimensions at a time for a while :-)

We loved Professor Rosling's presentation because of his passion for data and his vision for freeing data into the sunny light of the public.

Thanks for the post about Swivel.

Brian Mulloy
CEO & Cofounder
www.swivel.com