ReadWriteWeb

Opportunities to visualize data can turn the theoretical into the actual. Even so, many tools and services that do so are useful mostly to professionals - academics, economists, business people. Paper.li, a young Swiss company that turns a user's Twitter links into a newspaper-like Web page has been spectacularly successful at doing so for the lay person.

We're not the only entity to think so, apparently. A scrum of investors lined up behind the company, including Kima Ventures, whose co-founder, Xavier Niel, recently bought what is, arguably, France's best-known newspaper, Le Monde.

In my previous few articles, I've explored the potential impact of sensors on the Internet. Soon there will be a trillion sensors connected to the Web, which will result in an explosion of online data. How will this mass of new and mostly real-time data be processed and analyzed? Will current data analytics software be able to cope? The short answer is, no it won't. New types of analytics software will be required, together with much more powerful computers.

During my visit to HP Labs last month, I sat down with Meichun Hsu - director of the Intelligent Information Management Lab at Hewlett Packard - to discuss this issue. Hsu has been researching new real-time, sensor analytics solutions for the coming Internet of Things era.

While in New York earlier this month, I attended New York University's annual ITP Spring Show. ITP is a graduate program for communications studies and the Spring Show is a chance for students to showcase their interactive projects. I saw everything from Matrix-like interactive squiddies, to a woman on stilts powered by an iPhone app, to a paint brush that made music.

Probably the most impressive thing I saw, though, was a media project by a student named Zoe Fraade-Blanar. Current: A News Project is a prototype meme tracker using data visualization.

ReadWriteWeb and Tableau are pleased to announce the winner of the Tableau User Generated Graph Contest: Rina Bongsu-Petersen and her interpretation of U.S. obesity data (see below).

The judges - Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb's co-editor; Stephen Few, a leading data visualization expert; and Jock Mackinlay, Tableau's director of visual analysis - found the entry to be not just a powerful tool, but also an indicator of how easy-to-use data visualization is changing the world.

As part of our ongoing series in conjunction with Tableau Software and TweetStats, we've been looking at some of Twitter's most influential users. What it means to be a "top" user on Twitter has changed a lot since 2007. Recently we found out that a high number of followers, which most people use to judge the popularity of an account, doesn't actually really mean anything. However, Twitter lists - where we identify our favorites as "most influential" or "essential" - are still revealing. Today we're using lists to unscientifically analyze what we think are some of the some of the most influential people and entities on Twitter.

Making charts and graphs might not seem like an exciting way to spend your time, but new service Widgenie manages to make this common task relatively enjoyable. The service allows you to upload spreadsheets and create nice looking visualization widgets that can be embedded on web pages.

You might not make graphs very often, but the next time you do - this service is worth a look. There are a lot of graph making tools online, but few are as easy to use and attractive as this one.