Information is Beautiful

Information is Beautiful, a favourite website, features the Billion Dollar-O-Gram 2009 (click on the image for what each block means and make sure you scroll down to the pale peach one at the bottom), and its close relative, Debtris (there's a £ version too).

"This image arose out of frustration with media reporting of billion dollar amounts. That is, that they’re meaningless without context. But they’re continually reported as self-evident facts. 500 billion for this war. 50 billion for this pipeline. Literally mind-boggling amounts of money."

So the maps collate lots of different news reports in one place, and there's a link to all the data and sources.

Why do I like the website? Because I like analysing information to find patterns and relationships; because a picture is worth a thousand words - a visual representation can put over a message in milliseconds that takes pages of text to convey with much less impact; because someone else is doing all the work :-); because it is creating a small community of people who care about information and presenting it accurately, and are not afraid to point out errors and inconsistencies; because such images often make me stop and think, and have the power to change minds, and maybe even hearts; and because it could encourage politicians and journalists to report with integrity.