Trend: Tools for the common brain

As one who has spent a few decades honing my ability to recognize useful patterns within mind-numbing tables of raw data, I have to admit that visual representations of pretty complex datasets, like this demo application developed by Thinkmap (Visual Thesaurus), have me a little spooked.

Tools like these could eventually make productive analysis of even the dryest dataset friendlier or (gasp) even fun for the data-phobic. For those of us who are paid to "decode" research, the democratization of knowledge has a dark side. Excuse me, I need to review my value-added checklist right now (I know, welcome to the club).