Online marketing tools have given marketers and decision makers an amazing amount of mostly accurate data to mine.  However, as the saying goes, you can have too much of a good thing.  As we see it, there are three key issues:

• The mind-boggling amount of data generated by online data gathering tools, be they website server logs, keyword searches, ad impressions, clicks, etc.
• The relative lack of analytical tools to make sense of all that data and transform it into actionable knowledge (data in and of itself is prety useless, as you may have noticed).
• A seemingly total dearth of tools and experts that can take the still-confusing knowledge generated form the data and make it easily digestible by mere mortals, like your typical marketer (yes, that includes us).

There is obviously not much that we can do about the first issue.  And the second issue is slowly but surely being resolved through the emergence of more accurate, more user-friendly and more affordable analytical tools.  The third issue is something we have been bedeviled by with little hope for resolution…until  now.  In the past few weeks, we have come across a very impressive array of tools and companies that are tackling this nagging problem.  Not all of them are directly answering marketers’ prayers but the concepts and the thought processes are great harbingers of what we can expect in the marketing field.

Here are a few of our favorite data representation tools and companies:

• Given the celebrity-like status of Twitter and the huge amount of content and therefore date generated by it users, several Twitter visualization tools have pooped up.  Our favorite is TwitterThoughts which you can play with for hours here.
• This group out of the Netherlands creates very attractive and easily understandable (despite the complexity of the data) charts from Last.fm activity data.
• Fidg’t shows links between your Flickr pictures and Last.fm tags and those of your friends network in a very instinctive and appealing way.
• Rhizome Navigation maps out large genealogy data sets and animates them (as you can see in the video if you follow the link).
• Digg, through

  Digg Labs, has always had great visualization tools that make great sense of the massive amount of data that gets generated by its users: BigSpy, Swarm, Stack, Arc.

• Actually Digg Labs got some help from a company we think very highly of: Stamen Design.  Their site shows many of their incredible data visualization projects (too many to list and link here so try their main page).
• Another company, or rather individual, with a great resume in visualization is Martin Wattenberg. His NameVoyager (used by The Baby Name Wizard website)  has to be a great help for a lot of expecting parents and is a lot of fun to use for everyone. Shape of Song is another great combination of data manipulation and art-like visuals.
• Although more interesting for its message, and conceptually than visually, the World Clock is another great example of data representation.
• And finally, we are still drawn to the simple but mesmerizing Webpages As Graphs (which seems to be the official name).  We still don’t really know what to do with this tool but we sure love to enter URL’s into it.

Many thanks to two articles on Mashable for pointing out several of these (here and here).