We’re borrowing the title of a personal blog entry by technology journalist Erick Schonfeld because, frankly, he nailed it. Infographics are indeed broken, and closer and dearer to our hearts, he points out that DATA is also broken. Trapped in silos, spread across a myriad of destinations, in a million formats, with only a few streams opened up via APIs. In a word, it’s a mess.
As Erick also highlights, humans are visual creatures and the infographic craze we’ve been seeing the past year or two is a testimony to that. A nice info graphic means someone has been kind enough to come up with a realization, they sifted out and synthesized the relevant interesting data and then wove it into an easy to digest tapestry. We at Swipp love them. But we agree that the data is difficult to get to, and as a result we are all missing out on what-could-have-been in the way of these visualizations.
Naturally we have more thoughts on this, but we’d encourage you to take a read through Erick’s post and let us and him know what you think.
Photo Credit: Ivan Cash
[...] The ability to create data visualizations has come a long way over the last two years, but there is still much work needed to make data available to [...]