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IBM Many Eyes After One Month

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the measuring-the-web dept.

ReadWriteWeb writes "IBM's Many Eyes app, a 'shared visualization and discovery' service, has been running for a month now. In this article two of the IBM researchers behind Many Eyes, Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viégas, showcase some of the best visualizations so far. They also talk about the future of 'social data analysis' on the Web. Wattenberg and Viégas believe that Many Eyes is not just social software, but 'societal-scale software.' They say that Many Eyes represents a break from conventional visualization research. Traditionally, computer scientists concentrate on scaling in terms of data, making visualizations work for bigger and bigger databases. IBM's agenda with Many Eyes is to scale the audience, not the data."

7 of 35 comments (clear)

  1. I'm glad the summary was there by greenguy · · Score: 5, Funny

    Because otherwise, that would have been the most unintelligible headline I've ever seen on Slashdot.

    --
    What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
    1. Re:I'm glad the summary was there by Chacham · · Score: 3, Funny

      Upcoming headline:
      "IBM Many Eyes After Two Months"

      Or: Many eyes eye IBM Many Eyes
      Or: IBM eyes many Many Eyes implementations
      Or: I spy with my Many Eyes, something by IBM

      iii... this is too much.

      --
      Have you read my journal today?
  2. Best way to get people to look... by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 3, Funny

    I've found the best way to get people to look is to mark the package:
    "Private and confidential"
    and make sure everyone knows about it.

    Its from the same school of thought as the big red button.

    --
    liqbase :: faster than paper
  3. What a coincidence by Prysorra · · Score: 5, Informative

    It must be more important than I thought - I just found out about it by accident a couple of days ago.

    In case anyone is curious - Google is also into the data-visualization market. The Gap Minder is now avaible directly as an online Google App: Link to GapMinder

    Is there a surging market here we haven't seen yet?

  4. Comparison of Swivel and Many Eyes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    For a (very!) in-depth comparison of Swivel and Many Eyes, see http://eagereyes.org/VisCrit/Swivel-vs-Many-Eyes.h tml

  5. Too many demands on eyes by Animats · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Too many people are trying to make others do work for them for free. There's only so much attention to go around. And we're running out.

    Wikipedia made people think this could work, but Wikipedia today is mostly cruft. Most of the good articles were added when Wikipedia was a tenth the size it is now. What's coming in now is mostly dreck. Existing articles suffer from ongoing churn, as people make marginal edits and others revert them, without much real progress. Jimbo got out at the peak of the bubble.

    Then there are all those "rating sites". Those suffer from a scaling problem - rating only works when the number of raters is large compared to the number of things to be rated. Otherwise, stuff gets rated up by people promoting it.

    What we need is more automation, not more eyeballs.

    1. Re:Too many demands on eyes by mebollocks · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Sorry but this is just wrong.

      "Too many people are trying to make others do work for them for free." Really? How so? How many is too many? Perhaps you think too many people are willing to 'work', as you call it, for free?

      There's only so much attention to go around. And we're running out. Now we're running out of attention. Are you sure? Better get back to doing what we used to do and watch tv then so, before this silly attention-stealing, intarweb came along then so.

      Most of the good articles were added when Wikipedia was a tenth the size it is now. What's coming in now is mostly dreck. Existing articles suffer from ongoing churn, as people make marginal edits and others revert them, without much real progress. Well all its "good articles" (the articles that interest most) are finished. Wikipedia never becomes finished because at all times it's a snapshot of how society and culture sees itself at one moment in time.

      Then there are all those "rating sites". Those suffer from a scaling problem - rating only works when the number of raters is large compared to the number of things to be rated. Otherwise, stuff gets rated up by people promoting it. So we need more raters, "eybealls", if you will.

      What we need is more automation, not more eyeballs. So we don't need more raters, we need some magic algorithms that can extrapolate the truth from fewer raters. hmm...