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On this side of the planet, the summer has just started. Hence infosthetics is finally taking a long break to get away from it all, and will enjoy the western side of its spectacular host country in a +2,500km (+1,500 miles) motorhome road trip. Naturally, postings will be dramatically less for the next weeks, unless you really want to hear about some gorges, beaches, dolphins, whale sharks, and the inevitable sunburn.

FeedVis [jasonpriem.com] is an online tag cloud generator with some additional interactive features. Users can select specific time periods, common blog themes or individual blog feeds. Individual tags can be further explored to read specific blog posts of interest.

Tags are ordered by frequency and frequency change. Frequency denotes how many times a word is used per 1000 words.

The next geographical mapping startup, SpatialKey [spatialkey.com] is marketed as a "next generation Information Visualization, Analysis and Reporting System". It is specifically designed to help organizations quickly assess location-based information to allow for decision making processes and reporting requirements. There are several online demos available, ranging from "Wal-Mart store openings (1962 - 2005)" to "San Antonio prostitution arrests (January, 2006 - July, 2007)"

Doodle Buzz [doodlebuzz.com] is an online news aggregator with a visual twist. Users are requested to submit their favorite news theme or topic, and to draw a crazy, chaotic, all-over-the-place, messed-up, scribbled line on the white canvas. The line is then used as the framework to layout the headlines, summaries and related topics. The aim is to create an entirely new way of exploring information, one that allows for a kind of "quiet chaos" that gives people the opportunity to explore unthought of paths and connections along their news gathering journey. The data is fetched from DayPI, a recent service by DayLife that allows a new architecture of online news.

Japanese TV station WOWOW has a feature on their site that lets you mix a video of a live Radiohead performance [wowow.co.jp] from the Saitama Super Stadium leg of their 2008 Japanese tour. A set of quite aesthetic data visualizations accompanies this online music video mix tool.

The video interface allows you to choose from 12 colour-coded cameras to record your own "rainbow" (the song 15 Step is the opening track from Radiohead's In Rainbows album).

SIOC.ME [sioc.me] is a "real-time interactive visualization of boards.ie semantic data in three-dimensional space". The project was originally submitted for entry to the Boards.ie SIOC Data Competition that, based on over 10 years of online discussion and around 9 million documents, invited submissions to create something which uses the data in an interesting manner.

Three more animated infographic video that have not yet appeared on infosthetics.

Vizzl [vizzl.com] is a new visual search / shopping engine that allows users to perform dynamic filtering, sorting and a number of view modes on all the search results retrieved from Amazon, eBay or YouTube.

As a new Adobe Flex based application, Vizzl features dynamic animations and transitions to deliver a more immersive search experience, in an aim to make searching information "fun and fast". For example, Amazon books can be sorted by relevance, best selling, price, alphabet, or release date, while views can be changed to reveal more or less detailed information.

The Living Calendar allows people to read the weeks, the months, the holidays, and the time, all at once and all in a glance. A large hand shows the current day, and the current month, thus doing a complete turn during 365 days. A little hand shows the current day of week, and the current hour, and accordingly does a complete turn for 7 days. Moreover, the calendar marks the date of public holidays, religious events and momentous days.

According to the echo chamber that is the blogosphere, this clock can be yours for $94,950 (yep).

Life Flowcharts [lifeflowcharts.com] is a community-authored flowchart based on the topic of how to live one's life. The system is based on Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) / Vector Markup Language (VML), and programmed within the Google App Engine.

The recently released book "Data Flow: Visualising Information in Graphic Design" available at Amazon.com and Gestalten.de seems to be an ideal Christmas gift. The book introduces an expansive scope of innovatively designed diagrams, and presents an abundant range of possibilities in visualizing data and information. These range from chart-like diagrams such as bar, plot, line diagrams and spider charts, graph-based diagrams including line, matrix, process flow, and molecular diagrams to extremely complex three-dimensional diagrams.

There is an interesting blog post over at wallstats.com (well known from the Death and Taxes), analyzing and critiquing some of the recent charts and graphs created by the US Pentagon. It demonstrates how the graphics coming out of each branch of the military are vastly different.

The goal of Facebook's Project Palantir is to "visualize all the data that Facebook gets". Each Facebook action is geo-located on a 3D globe, becomes a particle that floats off the surface of the Earth, and then disappears. Facebook interactions (e.g. friend requests, pokes, wall posts) are shown by 3D splines or a trailing mesh connecting 2 locations, with each color representing a different sort of interaction.

Watch the demonstration movie at Facebook, or the high-quality YouTube version below.

A Junk Charts reader tipped us about this chart that appeared on the front page of one of their newspapers. It announced: "Iceland banks are in a universe of hurt".

As we all know, Iceland is bankrupt, and all its banks are spinning out of orbit. But is this outer-space concept successful in portraying the story? We think not.

Read the detailed critique below.

100 Ideas for Envisioning Powerful, Engaging, and Productive User Experiences in Knowledge Work [flashbulbinteraction.com] is an online reference for product teams creating new applications for work involving thinking, with a heavy emphasis on visualization in the example domains used throughout: Clinical Research (data analysis visualization), Financial Trading (market analysis visualization) and Architecture (building information modeling visualization). Specifically written for use during early, formative conversations, it provides teams with a broad range of considerations for setting the overall direction and priorities for their onscreen tools.

Advanced Beauty [advancedbeauty.org] is an ongoing exploration of digital artworks influenced by sound, as a collaboration between programmers, artists, musicians, animators and architects.

The first artwork collection includes a series of audio-reactive video sound sculptures, as manifestations of sound, sculpted by volume, pitch or structure of the soundtrack. The films embrace unusual video making processes, the visual programming language Processing, high-end audio analysis and fluid dynamic simulations alongside intuitive responses in traditional cell animation.

fLux, binary waves [lab-au.com] is an urban visualization installation based on the measurement and real-time representation of infrastructural (passengers, cars...) and communicational (electromagnetic fields produced by mobile phones, radio...) flows.

The kinetic wall comprises of a network of 32 rotating and luminous panels of 3 meter-high and 60 centimetres wide, placed apart every 3 meters. The panels rotate around their vertical axis, and have a black reflective surface on one side, the other being plain mat white. The microprocessors are connected to infrared sensors, capturing the surrounding infrastructural flows, and defining the frequency, amplitude and synchronization of the panel rotations.