The tools in this new interactive online platform allow users to change parameters, show more information, or zoom in or out when the mouse moves over a particular image. Users can add links and images to their visualisations in their blogs or websites, just as they can embed YouTube videos.

People can paste in a YouTube video of dogs on their blogs, so why not a visual, which offers an insight into the sea of data, which surrounds us, is the thinking behind this whole exercise. Users are seeing this in proper perspective. Rich Hoeg, a technology manager runs a blog at econtent.typepad.com. He was so fancied by the possibilities for group collaboration that he made a tutorial on using ‘Many Eyes’. He explains, “Many Eyes is unusual. It takes advantage of the collective intelligence of a group to get more out of a data set.”

A professor in the dept. of computer science, the University of Maryland, Ben Shneiderman is considered a pioneer in information visualization. He says that websites like Many Eyes are helping to democratise the tools of visualisation.

David Katz believes such features and also the fact that SportsFanLive is being positioned as an interactive community platform from the ground up sure will help it stand out in a crowded online arena. He is a former CBS & Yahoo Media employee.

He said, “There is no more passionate user I have ever seen on the Internet than the sports fan. I would argue that no one (so far) has really done this kind of community platform. I don’t see any innovation taking place among the big players. Everyone is running the same stories and adding things like message boards and fantasy sports.”

MySpace and Facebook would apparently be solid venues ‘to engineer the sort of fan interaction’ SportsFanLive is actually striving for, Katz felt that those websites are ‘not so great for sports fans; it’s hard to build subscription networks on those websites.”