Many Eyes is a Visualisation tool by IBM – upload your data set – choose a visualisation type and away you go. I’ve embedded a Tag Cloud of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech because it was easy to do, but any dataset (crime statistics/GDP’s/financial indicators) you can knock into shape can be used and visualised as anything from a Pie Chart/Line Graph to a Matrix or Network Diagram. The results are hosted on-line, can be linked into a topic hub for discussion and easily embedded on a web page.

It’s pretty neat and illustrates the strange reach of Web2 – on the one hand you’ve got people doing entity relationship diagrams of their Facebook contacts and bubble charts of the favourite baby names in Holland and on the other, the OECD created over 100 visualisations, from CO2 emissions to oil prices, in support of its World Forum on Statistics in June. Heady stuff.