Much will be said over the next week or so about the passing of two iconic celebrities Thursday, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, whose work will forever be associated with particular moments in our cultural history. I was a teenager at the height of Farah Fawcett’s launch and was well aware of the impact of her world-famous poster on all my male teenage friends. I also danced to many of MJ’s top 10 singles and watched his life choices play out over the national stage.
Today, the social Web, as we saw happen with Iran, impacts the movement of information about these two well known celebrities. Beyond Twitter and some blog entries, many sites have moved toward the artful use of visualization software to capture the impact and tremendous activity of newsworthy information. A day like today is when their stories play out.
Visualization software is a hot trend, part of all the latest media dashboard tool sets and an instant way for a consumer, client or executive, to interpret information.
Check out some of the cooler tools out there as they capture today’s news:
Twendz
“is a Twitter mining Web application that utilizes the power of Twitter Search, highlighting conversation themes and sentiment of the tweets that talk about topics you are interested in. As the conversation changes, so does twendz by evaluating up to 70 tweets at a time.â€Â This site pulls the prevalent emotional state of the Web as a whole within seconds.  This can best be seen today, with the flow of all the sentiment about Farrah and Micheal.
Twingly Screensaver –
Twingly screensaver is an applications that visualizies the global blog activity in real time. MJ chatter is immense at this moment in time. And the twingly globe is alive with Michael Jackson posts.
Labs.Digg.com
This site shows a visualization of Digg.com’s most active stories. I’m watching Michael Jackson related news flower out continuously on the ‘swarm’ visualization – a mode which captures digg’s surrounding a topic and unites them in a flower like visual.
Rest in peace MJ and Farrah…and I’ll watch as the world sends you peaceful thoughts.