Fans of graphical communication have long evangelized about the work of Edward Tufte (if you don’t recognize the name, you might be more familiar with the amazing graphic of Napoleon's march to (and retreat from) Moscow by Charles Joseph Minard, and his clever take on the limitations of PowerPoint). Communications pros have also long acknowledged the value of a well-drawn chart to make complex data more easily understood. And in all too many cases, misunderstood.
But of course the web changes almost everything. The talented and attractive Imagethief recently flagged this cool animation that visualizes 24 hours of global air traffic in just over a minute. With YouTube ubiquitous, it's time for communicators to start thinking about what data they have that can be made to move. Done right, you can move people to think or see the world differently.
