It was news to me that LinkedIn had a whole host of tools through their LinkedIn Labs site. According to the site
“LinkedIn Labs hosts a small set of projects and experimental features built by the employees of LinkedIn. We share them here as demonstrations and to solicit feedback, but please remember that they are intended to be low-maintenance experiments, and may be added and removed over time based on popularity and support. Also, checkout http://engineering.linkedin.com to learn more about the engineering teams at LinkedIn.”
Pretty cool, not only because they let the engineers do side-projects (which is good for productivity), but great they share them with the world.
There are lots of visualizations to choose from on this site, including visualization of which of your connections started something new last year, and a visualization of your connections. (Whatever you do, don’t start playing DropIn– Tetrus with your LinkedIn connections images in the boxes – it’s addictive).
One of the interesting ones is InMaps
What worked for me
- Very easy to connect with your LinkedIn network
- Gives you a good view of the various clusters in your network
- It’s pretty
What didn’t work
- Took a few minutes to run
- Not sure how useful it is
Bottom Line
Like many of the other “Personal Infographic” tools I’ve found, I’m not really sure what to do with this info. I have very clear clusters of connections from my women-in-business network, undergrad, grad school, Ernst & Young days and social, but how does that help me? Not really sure.
I would simply say that viislaizatuon is the transformation of information into a visual form The information could be a massive set of data it could simply be the relationship between two entities.This is similar to Christian’s view however, I think sometimes people do this as an art form (art being something that is purely created for aesthetic purposes) and only informative viislaizatuons are done in the pursuit of insight.I think this blog really specializes on informative and quantitative viislaizatuons. Using numerical data and relationships to create visual representations that invoke insight or highlight a relationship.Using the term viislaizatuon in this broad way (an umbrella term as Christian puts it) is totally fine in my honest opinion.CheersMatt