Top-10 lists in magazines drive me crazy. Most of the time they strike me as an editorial cop-out to justify republishing old content or creating unsubstantial, if pretty, layouts. Additionally, the fact that they're usually thinly veiled advertisements (Must haves!) doesn't help matters. But online lists, sparing trees and armed with hypertext, are less offensive and much more functional.
My favorite so far is short and sweet, Flowing Data's 5 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year. I appreciate the range of applications they've selected: The hugely popular blogger favorite Wordle gets honorable mention, while two geo-driven projects place first (Britain From Above) and fourth (House of Cards). I think steamgraphs are one of the most innovative data visualizations, graphically speaking, since sparklines. I hadn't even seen the Obama-Clinton regression tree, undoubtedly because I was distracted by the Sarah Palin flow chart. Finally, second place goes to Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar who use data visualization as means to a purely artistic end. An earlier piece of theirs, We Feel Fine, was critiqued in the article I mentioned in November.
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