The Billion Dollar Gram

This is one of those simple, but great infographics.  Once the news starts talking about "billions" of dollars, the brain goes numb and it all runs together because the numbers are too big for us to comprehend.

David McCandless, from Information Is Beautiful, created this tree map to show the relative size of the different billion dollar spending and budgets in the news.

Great job David, keep them coming!

A Year of Heavy Loses

Over at Nytimes.com, they have a good treemap showing the drop in market capitalization over the past year of most of the big financial firms on Wall Street.  It's a little bit interactive, in that when you hover your mouse over any box, you will see more details.

Found on infosthetics.com

Where Does the Money Go?

From the nytimes.com, this graphic visually represents how average consumer spending breaks down, and the color code shows how much spending in that category has changed in the last year. For example, Gasoline is 5.2% of an average consumer's spending, and it has risen 26% from 2007 to 2008.

As far as I can tell, this is actually a treemap, but in a new shape. More details pop-up when you mouse over each of the individual shapes.

Thanks to Tony, for sending in the link.

Treemaps for drive space

I don't think I've posted much about specific software programs, but there are a number of infographic programs that anyone can use. These two are programs that analyze what's on your hard drive, and show it you in a treemap display.

The one above is Disk Inventory X for the Mac (which I use), and the one below is WinDirStat for Windows. Both are free, and are real-life examples of how you can use infographics in your life. So take a minute, and clean off some of that old junk taking up space on your hard drive.

Marumushi News Map

Marumushi.com has a fantastic News Map using the treemap visualization style. This is one of the best implementations of a treemap that I have found. Updated every 6 hours, it groups news stories (from the Google news aggregator) by overall category (technology, world, sports, etc.). You can choose to show the news map from 11 different countries, and the color shading of each block represents how old that particular news story is. Hovering your mouse over any square shows the whole title, and clicking takes you directly to the story.

Consumer Spending (5% on Tech Stuff)

From Wired magazine (issue 15.08) a treemap infographic of consumer spending in 2005. 5% of all consumer spending was on technology, and of course, Wired broke down that 5% into an expanded treemap.

Internet access +216%, Residential phone -25%. VOIP seems to be making an impact.