I was hoping to find more than just words… links to those inspiring interactions at the very least.

Oops! My fault.

The three sites we talk about are Mint.com, Farecast.com, and Gapminder.org.

I would like to see someone do this for a specific sport where you could look at variables like — teams who played against each other, weather conditions, player heights, weights etc etc and see what it comes out with in terms of trends of team’s success/failure.

Definetly it is challenging job to present the data more useful. I’ve noticed that Kayak (www.kayak.com) has similar interface as Frecast. When I compared Kayak’s presentation with Farecast, Kayak interface is much easier than Farecast. Kayak has concentrated on users primary task which is finding the price for their search and secondary actions like compare prices presented in text links. Where as Farecast presented the results page with compare prices with attractive graphics which distracts users from results list view. Kayak’s “Chart” tab and Farecast’s “Prediction” tab both helps users to make decision.

Rajesh Kalidindi

Your coverage about Gapminder is extremely topical - exciting times are definitely ahead. Since Google acquired Trendalyzer (the technology behind Gapminder) in March 2007, there has been a period of silence about what Google plans to do with it.

In the last few weeks, however, a number of official Google gadgets for iGoogle became available. These include a Trendalyzer gadget (see http://www.google.com/ig/directory?q=trendalyzer&url=www.google.com/ig/modules/trendalyzer.xml) with which anyone should be able to plug his/her own data with this powerful visualization tool.

At the moment, documentation is still missing, so it is a challenge to figure out how this gadget actually works.

Timo