Some data visualization approaches worth considering

From the silly to the practical, this is a nice compilation of some contemporary approaches to visualizing data. As data become more and more part of our lives, there are more people thinking about ways to make easier use of it all. A very exciting trend. However, only the approaches that improve the human interaction with data -- not get in the way of it -- will survive. Many of these seem more complicated than useful, but there are a few nice ones. This nice demonstration of "elastic lists" caught my eye.

Tracking the Influence - the Conversation Index

Some chatter starting up about a recent Dow Jones white paper about tracking influence in the blogosphere.

And here's Jeremiah's post on it.

IABC -- Habitat for Humanity Build

My worlds colliding a bit here.

I'm passionate about Habitat for Humanity and certainly about business communications (not going to say which one is more important to me) and this is the first time I can post about both at the same time.

I recently attended the International Association of Business Communicators conference in New Orleans, where I was talking about Factiva's / Dow Jones's (um, News Corp.'s) media measurement products to a host of internal and external marketing professionals. I think it was wonderful that IABC didn't pull out of New Orleans like many other conferences reportedly have in the wake of the Katrina disaster. That city needs our tourism dollars now more than ever.

I also was pleasantly surprised to find that IABC had decided to team up with Wells Fargo to support Habitat for Humanity's post-Katrina projects. Too bad the Habitat trip for the conference attendees was filled so I couldn't lend a hand, but it was great that so many people were participating.

You can check out the video of IABC2007 sweating and building in the hot sun of the Big Easy.

(Habitat fans: Check out my New Jersey affilaite's blog and home page.)