The Internet is information — your information, my information — everyone’s information. Remember the regrettable words emailed to your sister four years ago? They’re still in cyberspace, along with the resumé you posted on Monster.com, your mortgage applications, the searches you did on “prostate cancer,” the old Facebook photos, your tax returns, buying habits and medical records. Your information floats around in the digital ether, like snow in a snow globe, until someone (corporations, retailers, health insurers, employers, lenders) shakes it into data-drifts that reveal who you are, what you buy, what you dream. The border between the private and pubic has been breached, big time.

What compensation can there be for losing our privacy? None. But there are creative folks out there working to provide a return on our loss. They convert digital information into visualizations we can use for our own ends. We can enjoy it, interact with it, or learn from it. In some instances the projects return control of digital information to us. A simple example of this is the “tag cloud.” This blog has a tag cloud. It’s in the right-hand column (scroll down) and looks like a random collection of words that are larger or smaller than their neighbors. But the scale of the words isn’t random at all. When one of our contributing bloggers adds a new post to the site, they also type in words or phrases (tags) that identify, in a nut shell, what the content of the post is all about. When a particular tag is used a lot, it grows larger. The bigger the font size, the more often that tag has been used to describe the content on the site. This creates an in-time profile of the blog that you, the blog visitor, can use to see, in an instant, what our blog is about.

Then there are the far more complex and interesting information visualizations. Take Digg.com. Digg is a wildly successful Internet business begun in 2004. It’s an experiment in user-controlled content sharing. The business goal: to make money, certainly. But it’s how Digg earns its money that makes it an interesting enterprise. Digg seeks to democratize digital media for the benefit of its users. Digg users vote for the stories, news and images they like the most, causing that content to float to the top of the Internet’s undifferentiated information pile. “As a user, you participate in determining all site content by discovering, selecting, sharing, and discussing the news, videos, and podcasts that appeal to you.” (StumbleUpon is another iteration of democratized Internet information sharing.)

So where does the information visualization part come in? Digg partnered with stamen design to create interactive animations that illuminate aspects of information behavior as it flows through the Digg site. Digg Labs has developed five animated views. Each reveals a different aspect of Digg’s information activities. Check out “Pics,” “Arc,” “BigSpy,” “Stack” and “Swarm.”

But let’s “digg” deeper still, to that specialized area of information visualization called “information aesthetics.” This is where a lot of experimental, cutting-edge work is being done. Artists, architects, product developers and designers have found ways to convert data, any kind of data (Internet data, transportation systems data, government census data, melting glacier data), and turn it into practical and not-so-practical realizations that enhance and enliven our daily landscape. They include sculptures, prints, building facades, eco-visualizations, “intelligent paint,” temperature-sensitive inks, an electro-luminescent time wall and a cloud harp.