Avinash Kaushik wrote an excellent post on The Awesome Power of Data Visualization a couple of days ago and I just had a chance to read it.   I like that Avinash draws from ideas outside of Web Analytics yet shows the how that is related to Metrics and Analytics - in this case it was a visual map of how the US Goverment spent tax money in 2006 - it is a very interesting to look at that "map" and see where the Goverment’s priorities are.  Without the Map you’d never see the relationships of how money is spent by the Goverment (you can see the entire map for Avinash’s blog).

In another life as a Unix Admin, I used to build High Availability Clusters for Large Banks and Insurance companies, and found I had developed a skill for diagramming my cluster servers, devices and storage; my goal was to put all the important information to know about a cluster in one or two drawings so that when I had to diagonose problems (and look at error messages) I could understand what I was looking at and reading; that took Art, and a lot of detective work - but after a day or so of work - I’d produce a logical drawing that often guided me for years later - like a map of my envionment - and would allow me to quickly co-relate information to the physical and logical location of the problem.

Here’s what I wrote on Avinash’s blog:

"Avinash,

Excellent Post - and it draws freely, from subjects outside of Web Analytics, but which relate to Analytics.

The charts you show plus those mentioned in comments to this post show me how much “Art” is contained in Web Metrics - Visualizing data in a meaningful way is…..finding what’s important and amplifying it - highlighting it - and if that’s not Art, I don’t know what is……

BTW, Avinash has some nice pictures of Hawaii - he was visiting Hawaii when he wrote the post, on July 5th.