Many Eyes: crowdsourcing + social computing + InfoViz

After selling its PC division, IBM recently dropped the printer business. At the same time, they explore other paths such as the super-mediatized SL but also other interesting platforms. I have intrigued by Many Eyes. Internet News has a short discussion about it:

IBM (Quote) launched a new social computing site today called Many Eyes, which allows users to upload very large data sets, choose different visual representations for the data sets, and engage in an online discussion of what the data reveals. Each visualization will allow for an active discussion to take place and become a common area to share ideas, add insight and understand the visualization in a group setting. (...) an attempt to learn whether the principles of crowd-sourcing can be applied to the analysis of visualized data, in the hopes of generating broader and deeper analysis of data.

Why do I blog this? I find interesting the IBM attempts to try and test new applications in the domain of social computing.