IBM has definitely tapped into a much needed service for the web. With the growing amounts of data various websites generate comes a correlated need for analytic tools and people who can breakdown that complex data for the layman. With Manyeyes, IBM has turned a once specialized service and a usually high priced solution into a free web based solution.

They offer some pretty awesome tools that allow you to not only collect web traffic data, but if you so choose you can display that traffic on your blog or website so that your visitors can see stats in real time. Beyond the aesthetic of showing of your technical prowess by doing that, the tools are simply useful. Manyeyes offers World maps, Country maps, Line graphs, Stack graphs, Stack Graphs for Categories, Bar charts, Block histograms, Bubble charts, Matrix chart, Scatterplots, Network Diagrams, Pie charts, Treemaps, Tag Clouds, and Word Trees.

They also allow you to share this information within what is sort of a social network of data visualizers. It doesn’t just do web analysis, ManyEyes can also read through any kind of data set you give it to create rich visualizations that are both useful and dissectable. Upload a passage from a book to see how many times a word or phrase is repeated, upload a yearly finance report to see which of your clients is actually your most lucrative….whatever you can use it for.

I joined Manyeyes last year and messed around with it and it’s easy enough to learn. If you have existing data sets that you want it to crunch head on over and check it out.

Posted in Blog, visualization ~