Having a particular interest in data visualization (more on how that relates to what we are doing here later), I was browsing around the Digg API visualization contest today. The many different approaches to building a meaningful representation of a dynamic data set made me realize that there are probably as many ways to solve that problem as there are people willing to build a solution (some wackier than others!).

Ultimately, what struck me about the different approaches to the problem is that sometimes, the simplest approach is the best. Although I didn’t like the fact that it was an Apollo application (yet another runtime to download and install), I thought the Digg Graphr application did a nice job of representing the relative popularity of articles in a way that was very intuitive.