I just read a fascinating article in the Financial Times, “The hidden beauty of numbers”. Three websites dedicated to data visualization are profiled:
IBM’s “Many Eyes” project is a data visualization website which enables users to load, visualize and discuss numbers.
Swivel is another site allowing people to share and display data. See an example of a Swivel chart based on data of the box office sales for the first four Harry Potter movies:
And now the really amazing stuff: Gapminder, software developed by a Swedish professor helps make statistics almost playful by mashing data and presenting it through animated bubblecharts.