Some interesting visualizations that some may want to check out.

Summize

The first is from an online shopping site called summize.

Rather than build yet another price comparison shopping site - which are great once you know what to buy - we've taken a reviews-first approach: we crawl the web for product reviews, aggregate those reviews, select the most helpful of reviews, and then take it one step further: we summarize the reviews.

Here’s some summaries from their front page:

summize review

That summary is actually a graphic that shows the spectrum of reviews from great to wretched. They explain why they did this in their about page and it comes down to the middle of road average rating. Here are three products they use in the about which all have 2.5 stars otherwise. As you can see the 2.5 can mean a few things:

  • - opinion split
  • - love/hate
  • - truly average

The above are actually live review graphics. They offer their “snips” as javascript includes based on a product search. As such it might be possible to include them in OPACs as well. You can read more on their tools page.

They also have a nice view on the product page of reviews over time:

summize review

Elastic Lists

Facets are starting to become popular in various search interfaces and Well-formed data has an interesting flash-based proof of concept for browsing data sets. There’s a live version so try it out.

elasticlist

You Say..We Say

Another interesting interface idea from Well-formed data is a tag comparison flash-based view that allows you to see how your tags compare to the rest of the community. It might be interesting to have a standalone page or even item specific page that shows how your tags relate to others. There is a downloadable version although it didn’t seem to work for me.

you say we say