I previously blogged about Gapminder and Hans Roslings talk at TED demonstrating this tool. I learned that you can see more eye-opening visualizations on a regular basis with GapCasts, a video blog from Hans and Co. These short videos really show the potential power of information visualizations in enhancing understanding.
One thing I noticed though, is that without a speaker explaining the visualizations, they wouldn’t make too much sense. Or least it would take a while to figure out what they really mean. So, the real challenge of info viz is in the interpretation of the graphs and charts, not in creating the visualizations. But how can a visualization be so self-explanatory that anyone can immediately understand what it’s really saying?