Kalu Kalu’s visualization script unveils the (more or less) long tail of your listening habits using attention-data recorded on Last.fm (found on Rocketsurgeon, which is a good read for all things Music 2.0).
at Barcamp, Walter Rafelsberger just did a nice demo of Rhizome Navigation, an application framework for building 3D-interfaces for navigating statistical data like web-server logs (similar to Digg’s swarm-feature) or user-attention data. try out the Java-frontend, download the demo or see this analysis of austria’s political parties’ manifestos using Rhizome Navigation.
analyzing website-traffic using the server’s access-log and common (free) tools like awstats or webalizer hasn’t really progressed a lot during the past years. the problem is, that log-data is too abstract for many business-executives and terms like ‘visit’, ‘unique visitors’ and ‘pages’ aren’t well-defined (f.e. the concept of ‘visit’ is based on an assumed timeframe/duration, which might differ among statistical tools). visualization service clickdensity offers an additional view on access-logs using heat-maps. by recording every single mouse-click (this is accomplished by integrating a javascript-snippet), clickdensity can generate visual representations of what links users are most likely to click on. moreover, clickdensity records the average time a user takes for his click.
clickdensity offers a 30day free-trial which records up to 5.000 clicks. the ‘Standard’-package for £50 records 250.00 clicks, high-traffic websites will be charged higher fees (see the details).
TechCrunch points to similar products, which in case of ClickTale (currently in closed beta) even record whole user-sessions to mini-movies, which is a nice feature if you plan deep anaylsis of how your visitors use your website. with the exception of Google Analytics (which doesn’t offer heat-maps), most services in the area of traffic-analysis are not free. clickdensity’s service seems quite pricy, but it’s a very clean way to get insight on top-level user-behaviour.
edit: can anyone remember that log-analyzer (probably 3+ years ago?) which visualized traffic-data in a SimCity-like animated environment? can’t recall that product’s name…
unimpressed by the ongoing dispute between digg-founder Kevin Rose and AOL/Netscape’s Jason Calacanis concerning Jason’s lucrative offer to top digg-submitters, digg labs just launched two innovative data-visualization-features which might help staying ahead of Netscape.
the stack is a live-representation of users digging storys. each digg is visualized as a white bar dropping from above. each stack on the ground symbolizes a story.
the swarm adds another dimension by representing every digging user by a yellow orb - you can even track users as they digg from story to story.
both features are flash-based and give a great impression of what’s currently going on at digg. I imagine that visualization-features like this can massively increase the feeling of ‘liveliness’ on any community-website.
