It’s cold and chilly in NYC tonight; much of the day it rained and drizzled and I felt I was on the top of a 39 floor mountain looking down into the rainy fog, below, from my midtown office space.

Today was interesting for a number of reasons including a few good posts on Google Analytics new visualization features and a nice review of motion charts by Dennis in VisualRevenue, where he said that charting more than 3 dimensions requires more complex charting, and that such charting is much more than eye candy.

I also saw that NuConomy, whose CEO I interviewed here, last May, just entered into a public beta today, and NuConomy has some pretty unique visualizations.

And then I did some work, on my own, using Comscore Local Market reporting for a select group of DMA‘s and websites, and overlayed unique visitors by DMA with internal data on job postings (by employers) and Resumes posted (by Job Seekers).

I saw some very interesting patterns once I overlayed the data, visualizing data in a way making sense to me.

It is all about traffic, but my visualization showed some DMA’s with less than expected visitors and resumes posted.

It got me thinking on how I may never have noticed the relationships between data points had I not had a hunch about it. I even figured out an “effectiveness metric” base on what percentage of traffic applied for a job during a session.

And it all comes back to visualization, which is why I’m an artist.

For me, it’s all about seeing relationships between data, and I was exhilirated as I had time to think this through.

Actually, there’s one more thing I’m adding (12 hours later) and I thought about it last week – in an organization, even a small one, but certainly in most large ones, there’s a lot of information lying around that only the people who use it regularly know about.   That’s a big challenge for a Web Analysts – because we create meaning in our work, largly by overlaying information.

But a lot of times ….. too often ….. we don’t have the right information (and even if we have it – it’s not in the right form or from the right source).    Therefore, I think it’s a top priority to create a map of every tool and every bit of information that exists in a company and who owns it (and uses it).   It starts with an audit – but it should be a database that you can search on, and it will will tell you the owner and users.

I’ve seen versions of tools at IBM that have some of this – but they were not created for the purposes I am talking about – it was more done for accountability, and only covered certain kinds of ownership – what I’m talking about is a map of all the knowledge in the organization – and who has it and uses it.

And I don’t see that anywhere.