Information is Beautiful

Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder. True that. If you were to ask me, I find beauty in perfection, simplicity, symmetry and last but not least in the very concept of time. But information too can be beautiful, if visualised, thereby helping us unravel the hidden connections and understand the world we live in better. So here's a list of some of my favourite data visualisations across the web:

Google Hot Searches

Google Trends Visualizer - That Google is sitting on a goldmine of data is well known to us, but what better than putting it into some solid use to capture search trends and the latest hot searches. Google Trends does all of that and more!

Google Earth View - A collection of some of the most gorgeous and eye-popping aerial imagery of Earth. Calling it 'beautiful' would be an understatement!

Transit Visualisation Client - An interactive map of the world's major mass transit systems, TRAVIC offers an incredible almost-real-time colourful insight into how these networks operate.

If The Moon Were Only 1 Pixel - A tediously accurate scale model of the solar system realised on screen by ingeniously shrinking the diameter of the moon to 1 pixel (i.e. 1 pixel = 3474.8 km), thereby neatly encapsulating the emptiness, enormity and vastness of the universe we live in. How Far is it to Mars? likewise adopts a pixel-based concept to visualise the distance to Mars from our planet.

Earth - A mesmerising animated global map of wind and weather conditions, not to mention the fact it's soothing to see those neon coloured lines making their way across the globe, just like as if it were an enormous school of fish!

The Internet Map - Want to experience the beauty of the Internet? Then the Internet Map is the one for you, representing every website as a circle, its size determined by website traffic, and spatially arranging them based on how frequently users jump from one website to the other.

Story of the Web - Not a visualisation per se, yet beautifully traces the 25 year old history of the Internet and the World Wide Web which we take for granted these days!