One of my favourite magazine, the German c’t, has recently published a story on the visualization of complex information. The article contains a lots of interesting links to information visualization sites that I would like to share with you. Thanks to André Kramer who has written this excellent article. Information design offers a lot of interesting insights for knowledge managers. Please have a look:

• The visualcomplexity.com site offers more than 600 examples of information design. Of them, nearly 100 belong to the “knowledge networks” domain.
• Andrew Wande Moere, a senior lecturer of the University of Sydney, offers information design example on a continuous basis in his blog information aesthetics.
• Chris Harrison has also collected some interesting visualization projects.
• Have you ever wondered how a chess computer thinks? Just try it out with Thinking Machine 4.
• The Cyberspace Atlas offers various views on internet’s visualizations.
• The Twingly Screensaver shows new blog entries just in time on the globe.
• The TouchGraph Navigator visualizes relational information (free software).
• WinDirStat is a treemap file explorer. Each file is represented by a colored rectangle.
• LiquiFile could be the file explorer of the next generation. The good news is that the inventor is based in Germany. The bad news is that’s available for Mac only.
• I’m not sure if somebody will like AnyMails. To treat each mail as a microbe with different shape and size is certainly an interesting methaphor, yet not so viable in daily life. The same applies to the tree icon as a new way to show the age and size of files.
• Who ever wonders what top managers think about in tough times may have a look at the EnronExplorer. The 200’000 e-mail archive offers insight into the lives and preoccupations of Enron’s top executives during the 1999 – 2002 period.
• Last but not least Gapminder shows really astonishing relationships that debunk myths thanks to historic statistical data. The powerful visualization combines three types of data in one chart plus the timeline for each combination of countries in the world. Hans Rosling offers the most useful information design tool (see video).