Infographic Charting Service – January 2010 Ideas
The twenty-sixth idea for my 365 social ideas is a new brand of charting service: A service designed for infographics, but with sharing, collaboration and synergy as an added side-effect.
The idea is to create a site enabling users to create infographics of the simplest kind initially, but then expand this to even more complex ones. For starters, it could allow users to create tables of data defining row and column labels and then selecting icons, colors and values for cells and having this displayed as larger and smaller icons according to the values – like this chart of the “deadliest drugs”. And allowing people to color-code maps of countries, cities or states according to some data would be quite simple to do as well – like this map of the origins and relationships of European languages.
But more important than simply creating cool visualizations, each infographic has an input page. This page can only be edited by the original creator of the infographic, but it includes direct links to sources of information used. The site should use a simple url structure (inspired by bit.ly), where the short-code would give the actual image, but with a + added (like http://bit.ly/365ideas+) it would be a link to the page describing all this background data.
And now comes the collaborative part: While only the creator can edit the data for the published infographic, anyone can copy the data to branch it as their own new infographic. These relationships will then also be displayed on the about page, as in “this is a spin-off of X and has Y spin-offs of its own”. Somewhat like the very nice ActionScript-programming website wonderfl. Here you can e.g. see that this creation of 250,000 particles is a spin-off from another simulation and has itself spun off into new simulations.
In time, this could be extended heavily and should of course have a public API for creating infographics easily and freely. New types of infographics could be added along with more complex editors allowing you to play around with the data as you see fit. It should be free to do and should not require complex knowledge of Illustrator or Photoshop.
This idea about letting others built on your own ideas could actually be implemented by many sites. The new Firefox 3.6 has “personas”, which is a very light theme engine – that most importantly does not require restart! But why didn’t the developers add a very fast and quick branching mechanism? If you found a cool persona, but didn’t like the color of the top-bar – just branch it, change the top-bar color and publish as a new persona (with credit where credit is due of course linking back to the original).
Why?
Simply: Infographics to the people! I’m not suggesting, that the creators of the coolest infographics aren’t brilliant. But they’re in the business because they both know how to find the data, how to present it and how to use the programs needed to create them. Let’s take the software knowledge part out of the equation and allow anyone with ideas and info to visualize it. And let’s do it openly and collaborate, not just publish a PNG and kill innovation.
What’s next?
Do with this idea whatever you like – expand, implement, trash or forget. Just remember, that if you use it in anyway make sure to attribute me according to the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, that all these 365 Social Ideas are published under.
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Category: API, January 2010 Ideas, Trends Comment »