visual

Digg Labs quietly launches BigSpy

Digg's Labs section launched last year with new ways to visualize Digg activity. Last week BigSpy, a new visualization tool that's eye candy in the purest sense of the word, quietly popped up. New stories appear at the top of the page, which offsets the rest of the stories in a wavelike motion. The more popular a story, the larger it is and the bigger the "wave" it causes on other stories. It's a mesmerizing effect.

One of the other Digg Labs' tools, Stack, was also updated. Stack essentially shows the popularity of a story … Read more

Data made fun with Swivel

Swivel is a data visualization service that lets you add your own data sets or search from a large pool of public submissions. If this sounds boring, it shouldn't. It's actually kind of fun and very similar to browsing Flickr. Data is presented in several ways, from pie charts to bar graphs to scatter plots. You can also easily tab over in any graphical chart representation to get the raw chart numbers. Where was this when I was in college?

Most of the content on Swivel is fairly bland, such as the prime loan rates for banks, but … Read more

All the pretty pictures from Craigslist: Listpic

Just got a ping from the developer of Listpic, a service that provides a visual interface into Craigslist. Want to see all the motorcycles for sale in your area? Or houses for rent? This tool will display just the pictures. Clicking on one displays a pop-up of the listing. Clicking again pops you over to Craigslist. It also works with personals. Very easy to use, very useful, and a lot of fun. Thumbs-up from me.

It also made me think: how cool would it be if Like.com searched Craigslist (and eBay) in addition to the online retailers it currently … Read more

Riya launches Like.com, visual search for shoppers

Earlier this year, Riya launched an extremely cool face-recognition system for your family photos. Today at the Web 2.0 Conference (but not during the Launchpad sessions), Riya said it is launching its next product, Like.com, a visual catalog and search tool for consumer goods.

The site lets you search for items by keyword. Once you find a picture of one you like, you can find more that look like it. You can also adjust sliders to tell the system that color is more important to you than shape (or vice versa), and you can zoom in on a … Read more