http://vis.berkeley.edu/papers/sense.us/video/

IBM Research, in conjunction with Berkeley, has published a whitepaper based on Fernanda Viegas' research of fusing collaboration, annotation, and interactive visualizations.

By placing all of these together in such close proximity they build a very compelling canvas for decision making. 

The visual above shows how these items are fused together...

a) An interactive visualization that can move between filters (gender) and proportions (% or actual)

b) An Annotation framework for adding labels, lines, and text labels into the visualization based on context.

c) Save various filtered views per user

d) Blog or comment on their findings as well as providing links to the views stored in (c)

e) A collection of New Comments, All Comments, or even replying to a posted comment.

f) Finally, the visualization is URL addressable, which means that documents and email transmissions can leverage this framework.

Notice the explanatory text at the bottom of the visual encouraging exploration and commenting. 

http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/2006/04/fixing-excel-chartsor-why-cast-stones-when-you-can/

Found this great site from a post at Dan Meyer's Blog.  Recently I've been trying to put these principles to work with some Reporting Services work I've been involved with.

http://www.stratature.com/

This starts to corral the Master Data Management issue across the BI/Office Stack.

Chris Webb has some more Info on this, as does Jamie Thompsonn.

http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/dataviz1.html

This cool visualization shows regions with the greatest attack traffic - China and Venezuela are hottest in this view. 

I'm currently working on a small proof of concept for a customer that involves monitoring web applications from a User-Experience perspective.  In other words, how long does it take for various web pages/web parts to materialize for a given user. 

I wrote this small VB.Net program that takes a URL (hardcoded in this case, but data base driven in the real scenario), sucks it down to the calling machine and then records the time in milliseconds.

The real app stores the response time in a SQL Server database every 5 seconds. 

Here's the code...

'Address of URL
Dim URL As String = "http://maps.live.com/?q=&mkt=en-US&FORM=BDIR"
' Get HTML data
Dim client As WebClient = New WebClient()
Dim clockstart As Date
' Gentlemen, start your timers...
clockstart = Now()
Dim data As Stream = client.OpenRead(URL)
Dim reader As StreamReader = New StreamReader(data)
Dim runLength As Global.System.TimeSpan = Now.Subtract(clockstart)
' Click! Stop the Timer!
Dim millisecs As Integer = runLength.Milliseconds
' If you don't close the reader stream you get strange results after a couple of samples...
reader.Close()

I then built a simple Reporting Services Report that can used as a web part in Sharepoint (by calling Toolbar=False in the URL).

For a test I monitored various Microsoft Web Properties from my home wireless network...

You can see I also allow a threshold to be stored per link (shown in orange).  The web part can be stacked as you see above, or just be a single site web part.  Clicking on a web part can send the user to deeper diagnostics. 

As I mentioned in my "mini-bars" post I have tried to move away from the garish colors that so commonly accompany Reporting Services Reports (the default colors of the palette) and I try to use more muted colors.  Also, it is interesting that these charts don't have to be huge to convey the information successfully.

I've been away on vacation for a few days but wanted to point you to a few fantastic posts that have been put up over the last few weeks...

Nick Barclay has a great posting on Where do I put my KPI's?
This is a question I get a lot as Microsoft does not have a real rationalized approach to KPI definition or storage.  This post gets you through the mental avenues you need to travel.

Adrian Downes pointed us to a great BI SOA article:
Bridging the Impedance Mismatch Between Business Intelligence and Service-Oriented Architecture

http://www.directionsmag.com/article.php?article_id=2477&trv=1

Also, here's a good run down on "Flat Earth" vs. "Round Earth" geodetic data:

The "Flat Earth" (planar) data type represents geospatial data which has been projected from its native, spherical, coordinate system into a plane (we all do agree that the Earth is not flat, right?). As such, the geometry model necessary to support planar data is much different than its counterpart for supporting the "Round Earth" geodetic model. The Flat Earth data type (GEOMETRY) will feature a traditional planar model with all of the advantages and limitations. The Round Earth data type (GEOGRAPHY) will operate on an ellipsoidal model in which the Earth is defined as a single continuous entity. The geodetic GEOGRAPHY type will not suffer from the singularities (international dateline, North and South Poles, map projection zone "edges," etc.) which causes data handling problems for the planar GEOMETRY type. Without map projections to worry about, the typical user can concentrate on the spatial problem at hand. With the growing use of GPS-like devices (making room for the expected follow-on technologies to GPS) and the growing availability of data in geodetic coordinates (i.e. WGS84-based latitude and longitude coordinates), we felt that our geospatial offering should recognize the inherent difference between the two Earth models and not try to co-mingle them.

More info on this Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/isaac/archive/2007/05/29/one-type-two-types.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/bimusings/archive/2007/06/04/microsoft-acquires-dundas-s-data-visualization-components-sql-2008-news-download-ctp3.aspx

Microsoft is announcing the purchase of Dundas visualization components - makers of great visualization controls like charts, gauges and map controls that can be hosted in ASP.Net apps, Sharepoint and Reporting Services.

This will make a huge change by adding these high quality parts into some pervasive dev platforms like Visual Studio and/or Reporting Services.