A new experimental online platform ‘Many Eyes’ has various interesting features to compare charts, tables and data feeds. One tool, termed an interleaved tag cloud, allows users to compare the relative frequencies of the words in two passages side by side – for example, President George Bush’s State of the Union addresses in 2003 and 2004.

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.