Feedburner, who are now managing over 227,000 feeds, have released a flash animation to represent the growth of the Feedburner service. It was created for The Data Dump: Fun with Charts and Graphs session at O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference. It’s an animation of raindrops falling on water, where the drops represent new feeds, blue being text feeds & orange are podcasts, the larger the splash, the more popular the feed. It’s a really nice way of demonsatrating growth for a company that has fixed metrics like Feedburner. A similar approach could be used for a company like Apple to show the growth in the iPod market, with each drop being a sale, the larger drops bing the video iPod and the smaller ones being the Nano

For the interested, this is an example of Information Visualisation, that is, a way of expressing information in a visual (and in this case, aural) way which makes it easier for people to understand. Here’s a more formal definition:

Information visualization, an increasingly important subdiscipline within HCI, focuses on graphical mechanisms designed to show the structure of information and improve the cost of access to large data repositories. In printed form, information visualization has included the display of numerical data (e.g., bar charts, plot charts, pie charts), combinatorial relations (e.g., drawings of graphs), and geographic data (e.g., encoded maps). Computer-based systems, such as the information visualizer and dynamic queries have added interactivity and new visualization techniques (e.g., 3D, animation).

Averbuch, 2004

You can find lots of other examples and explanations on the InfoVis Wiki.