B-List

1. Data Visualization: Modern Approaches
<http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/02/data-visualization-modern-approaches/>
"Let's take a look at the most interesting modern approaches to data
 visualization as well as related articles, resources and tools."

A selection:
* Musicovery
  <http://www.musicovery.com/>
"displays music taste connections and lets you listen to the song and
 browse through similar songs."
Select genres and mood settings: Dark <-> Positive + Energetic <-> Calm

* MusicMap - Visual Music Search Application
  <http://www.dimvision.com/musicmap/>
"connections are represented as connected lines; they create a web"
Appears to use Amazon's catalogue search and "explore similar items"
facilities.  To start, click on "NEW SEARCH" and enter an artist or
an album.

* Elastic Lists
  <http://well-formed-data.net/experiments/elastic_lists/>
"demonstrates the 'elastic list' principle for browsing multi-facetted
 data structures. You can click any number of list entries to query the
 database for a combination of the selected attributes. The approach
 visualizes relative proportions (weights) ofmetadata by size and
 visualizes characteristicness of a metadata weight by brightness."

* Newsmap
  <http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/>
"an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape
 of the Google News news aggregator. The size of data blocks is defined
 by their popularity at the moment."
I posted this to the B-List 3 years ago.

* Voyage
  <http://rssvoyage.com/>
"an RSS-feader which displays the latest news in the 'gravity area'.
 News can be zoomed in and out. The navigation is possible with a time-
line."


2. Amazon Concordance and Text Stats

Amazon has recently added Concordance and Text Stats for many books.
When viewing a book's page, look for the "Inside This Book" section
after the "Product Details".
* Concordance shows the 100 most frequently used words a book.
* Text Stats shows Readability, Complexity, Number of Characters,
  Words and Sentences, and "Words per Ounce"/"Words per Dollar".

At the very easy level of readability is "The Cat in the Hat":
  <http://www.amazon.com/Cat-Hat-Seuss/dp/sitb-next/0679891110/ref=sbx_con>
Interestingly, "Ulysses" by James Joyce is apparently not that as hard
to read as its reputation would suggest, at least according to Amazon:
  <http://www.amazon.com/Ulysses-James-Joyce/dp/sitb-next/0679722769/ref=sbx_con>