Visualizing.Org is a community of creative people working to make sense of complex issues through data and design… and it’s a shared space and free resource to help you achieve this goal. One of the main tools is the new visualization player. From their website:

Great visualizations of all kinds — from high-res infographics to interactive HTML5 apps — deserve stellar representation always. Instead of settling for embedded screenshots or links, as of today people can now easily embed your actual project (under CC license) using the Visualizing Player. This is a first for the field and we hope it helps make including data visualizations in blog posts and articles easier and more satisfying to readers and gets you and your work more attention.

It’s a free media player designed specifically for data visualization and interactive graphics; it currently supports 7 formats (HTML5, Java, Flash, PDF, Video, Image, and URL). Its easy to embed in other sites and there are a lot of example visualizations from the community hosted at visualization.org.

One of them is Gregor Aisch’s interactive graphic on Europe’s Energy production, consumption, import/export and dependencies:

After playing with many of the example visualizations I have two spontaneous reactions:

First, there is a lot of opportunity and possibility to display dynamic and complex information interactively. Not all infographics are interactive, of course, but those that are give you a sense of the power of interacting with the underlying data and models.

Second, there seems to be a lack of generally accepted standards to convey certain types of information. It’s a bit of a wild-west situation with lots of creative approaches to visualizing data – for example look at the many different approaches to the UN Global Pulse data on the above community visualizations page. It reminds me of the graphical user interface days before the standardizing advent of Windows. Not that this is a bad thing; it just feels a bit overwhelming at times.

It’s going to be interesting to see which styles of interactive presentation will become widely adopted.