One of the most exciting concepts demonstrated during ETech was a data visualization concept, a phenomenally attractive and useful way to find information so quickly and thoughtfully, it seems at once elegant, clever, and obvious. The company: Stamen, a design studio in San Francisco. The application: Like anything in the visual world, it's easier if you just see it, but it involves a series of sliders that make underlying data come to life as you stretch the boundaries of the information you're looking for.

By way of example, Trulia, a site where you can find real estate in certain geographies with certain parameters, worked with Stamen to create Trulia Hindsight, which lets you explore, say, the growth of Plano, Texas, in the 1990s after Frito-Lay and JCPenney moved headquarters there in the 1980s. Or the affect of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake on the population of Seattle in the same time frame.

A spectacular example can be found on the mySociety site, where the goal would be to let you pick a destination, perhaps where you need to work, and finding a city to live in that’s within a certain commute time from the destination. Or, enter the amount of money you're willing to pay for a home and it will show you the areas you can afford. Now mash that up and you can use this tool to find cities that meet your commute desires AND your price range.

Rodenback showed an application called Crimespotting, run in Oakland, and showing crimes along a series of parameters, such as type of crime. But what's interesting here is that you don't start at the normal place for such a search -- i.e., the search itself -- but with ALL of the data visually represented, ready to be winnowed and explored. This is exactly the opposite of how we'd normally do research, but exactly the way it should work -- start big and work your way into specifics.

Stamen's goal is to create something cool (a "spectacle"), but also useful (the "analysis"), in fact, the intersection of those two. Now that would be truly interesting.