Visualisation and Mash-ups with Social Media - Where could this take us?

This post has the theme of decision making in today's world of social media. What is the impact of social networks and data mash-ups and visualisations of their content on decision making?

The post on Talented Apps looks at the role of humans in the network the concept of balancing the size of the network (the number of the participants) and the voice of the individual.

A recent post Harvard Business Review: Four Ways of looking at Twitter demonstrates how trends can be pulled from social networks. Another post Tech Crunch: Five Ways to Mix, Rip and Mash your Data. provides an overview of tools that can be used to build agents to bring together information from RSS feeds and other sources giving people more tool sets to gauge information flow.

But what does popularity in tweets or RSS Feeds mean?

I find myself tossing between two quotes:

"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas."
- George Bernard Shaw

and

"There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause." - P.J. O'Rourke

Visualisation - Ideas for communication

When trying to share ideas across a broad spectrum of stakeholders, information visualisation techniques can be very useful. I recently came across Fantastic Information Architecture and Data Visualization Resources and I found some of the visualisations inspiring.

Another site that brings out powerful world demographic visualisaitons is Gapminder

This talk from Chris Jordan on www.ted.com uses visualisation to help people grasp how our actions affect the world around us.