Technorati estimates that the blogosphere has doubled in size every six moths for the last three years. On average, 175,000 new blogs are introduced to the web each day. For the typical individual/organization, keeping up with, communicating and making sense of this data is difficult/impossible. How then, can one effectively communicate what is happening on the web in ways that are simple to understand? Cue data visualization, a technique used since the dawn of man to communicate both abstract and concrete ideas through images, diagrams and animations.

Historic examples of data visualization include: Greek geometry, cave paintings and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Conventional approaches include: pie charts, bar graphs, tables and histograms (rapidly becoming outdated). Replacing these static forms of data visualization are dynamic, radical, creative and fascinating web based applications. Here’s some of my favorites (old and new).

1. Marumushi’s Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News aggregator. The color-coded data blocks are defined by their popularity at that moment. It reveals underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news; on the contrary, it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it.

2. We Feel Fine harvests human feelings from a large number of blogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.)

3. Twistori is an ongoing social experiments based on twitter. It shows the most recent 100 tweets for each keyword.

4. Informationarchitechts.jp portray the 200 most successful websites pinned down on the Tokyo Metro Map, ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective

5. Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. Just paste in a bunch of text or enter a blog or del.icio.us user name and presto, you’re done.

6. Websites as graphs is an HTML DOM Visualizer Applet that displays websites/blogs as graphs. Enter in a URL and a unique graph will populate itself based on the sites links, tables, div tags, images, forms and other tags.

7. Digg labs provide a broader (and deeper) view of Digg. My favorite app is BigSpy. It places stories at the top of the screen, as they are dugg. As new stories are dugg, older stories move down the list.