Made By Many hosted a great talk the other day. TED speaker Manuel Lima gave the audience a great start on the subject he´s clearly passionate about.
I got the impression that althought we were all interested in this new area, many of us were concerned about the functionality of data viz. Although Manuel gave us some great examples (traffic/tourist flux, terrorists email networks), he didn´t seem to be judgemental about what´s useful and what´s not (ie discarding options) but was much more concerned about the techniques that people were coming up with (even if you were only representing your fb network).
Personally, I really liked that attitude of leaving things open.
For a more detailed write up of the talk, try the following link
http://www.madebymany.co.uk/data-viz-talk-sparks-passionate-debate-and-a-manifesto-001827
If you want to find out more:
http://creativity-online.com/work/cat-2009-joann-kucheramorin/17301
