Fun: Visualization and Music

Reading blogs and feeds may be good for work but work alone can sustain no one. Nor can it sustain most peoples' interest in all the new things going on online.

A number of people that we asked said that Google Maps, Earth and Streetview were their favorite things to show new users. Those certainly make a big impression. That's especially true with the new redesign of Google Maps and Streetview. For the sheer power of Google's view of the globe to be compacted down into my little browser is truly awe inspiring.

Looking at images of our world and the streets we live on isn't the only visualization that's easy to get excited about, though. Hardware blogger Mari Silbey says she shows people image browser CoolIris. That's fast becoming a very popular browser extension.

None of those visualization tools offer quite the feeling of teeming humanity that journalist Craig McGinty's favorite, TwitterVision, does. This world map of real time Twitter messages immediately communicates that there are everyday people all around the world communicating with new online tools, all day long. It's quite compelling.

While you're perusing all this imagery, why not listen to some music in the background? A number of people we asked said that they liked to show people music recommendation sites Pandora and Last.fm or MP3 blog aggregator Hype Machine.

Showing people not just free and legal music online, but free and legal music where the discovery is powered by algorithms, network effects and economies of scale - that's an exciting experience for almost anyone. It still excites me every time I visit these sites and think about what's going on.

Perspective: History

All of these tools and toys that we show people to share our excitement about the new web deserve some amount of criticism, as well, for a balanced perspective. The wisdom of the crowd may not be the best way to have your editorial decisions made in music, news or other content. Google's omniscience warrants some serious skepticism. RSS increases information consumption but may very well cost us contemplation.

We believe that these tools are still worth using, though. When used well, they give us super-powers as information workers. Those powers can be used for good.

There was a time in history when access to knowledge came in the form of monthly rides on a horse into the local town where the library was located. Those times had their up-sides, but our relationship to this kind of knowledge about the world was not one of them.

None the less, life before Web 2.0, life before the internet, certainly had a lot to offer. The Digital Divide not withstanding, we who live in many parts of the world will find ourselves, relatively soon, with no one in our lives who remembers what the world was like before the internet. That will be a significant loss for our collective knowledge.

Perhaps talking to people who do not live in the web, showing them what we're excited about, can be a learning experience for us as well as for them.

What about you? What do you like to show people first who are unfamiliar with all of this? Let us know in comments; those wonder-filled moments of discovery are fun to think about. Perhaps it's the memory of that high that keeps so many of us tuned in to all the new applications that launch every day - the hope that we will find "another RSS," another Pandora/Last.fm, another game changer that we couldn't even imagine before it came into our lives.