Real time information design – DIGG Labs Arc

Posted in Design & user experience, Digital culture, Exceptional design, Great resource, Information design on August 28, 2008 at 7:49 am

I am a sucker for great information design and I have thought for a long time that what Digg labs does with it in real time is probably the best I have ever seen. I first wrote about Digg labs back in November of 2006 with their Swarm information display and today I was cleaning out old entries that I never published and realized I never wrote about my favorite tool – Digg arc. The concept here is again the information display of stories in real time as people Digg them on Digg.com. The stories arrange themselves in a circle in color coded groups depending on their subject matter like science, lifestyle or entertainment. The screen name of the user who created the Digg appears around the outside and if they Digg more than one story during the session then a connector line appears between all of the stories they have acted on. You can also down arc as a screensaver which is interesting since it is able to run for a longer session than you would normally have in a web browser so the resulting chart is really elaborate.