A jet-lagged Regine Debatty of Worldchanging.com writes from etech08 in San Diego.

She describes her excitement listening to Eric Rodenbeck, founder and creative director of Stamen Design, talk on Information Visualization is a Medium.

clipped from www.worldchanging.com

Worldchanging readers may already be familiar with the work of Stamen, especially with the visualizations they created for Digg.com (Swarm and Stack) or the brilliant cabspotting, which Alex wrote about here a while ago.

The focus of the talk was on process of analysis and how the concept works both for Stamen and culturally. For Stamen Information visualization is a medium, not a technique per se.

The first project that illustrated this statement is Trulia Insight, a real estate aggregator, search and information tool they developed for Trulia, a real estate company based in San Francisco which aggregates information about properties around the United States.

The mashup combines historical real estate data with a "heat map" that displays which properties are hot. People looking for a house can search for real estate by zip code, or other parameters like size, cost, and building type. Houses glow different colors as they are built and re-built over the years,