I'm a sucker for purdy things...

http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/app

You can thank my Morocco connections for this one. It’s a tool that is designed to take data sets that you provide and turn them into a variety of graphical representations.

Here is Obama’s speech at the DNC, turned into a word tree with McCain as the roots. http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/app

I’m still wrapping my head around what it all means, but I do know that it at least looks cool and I’m a sucker for that.

I can see this tool making a cool graph for a client that has plenty of data to work with… say Coinstar or HPWatch? Once again, I don’t know how but I do know that it would look cool.

Facebook Lexicon Pops!

Looking for a way to gauge your brand's penetration into the world of Facebook? Interested in whether geeks around the world talk more about Star Wars or Star Trek? Want to know whether Lindsey or Britney is the hotter topic of conversation? A quick and dirty way to find out is Facebook Lexicon. Lexicon shows the number of users that posted each term per day on a profile, event or group Wall on the popular social networking site.

It's great for comparing competitors or analyzing emerging trends (for example, the term "cyclone" has seen a huge jump in the past 5 days). While it doesn't provide raw data (it only shows the relative position of a term over time against itself or other words), it can be very helpful in getting a snapshot of how the community is reacting to you.

You can view the trend over several months or just a few hours.

So, hop on to Lexicon and start exploring what's hot on the Facebook network!