I have been remiss in my blogging duties recently, for that I apologize. I have been catching up on some learning. I finally relented and bought into the ggplot2 graphics package for R. Hopefully, I will share some of that with all of you soon. I also decided to pick up some Ruby on Rails and finally learn some more about social network analysis, an area that I have long wanted to delve into. There is actually a meetup about R and social network analysis tomorrow at the LinkedIn offices, more information available here.

One reason that I want to learn more about social network analysis is the growing influence of social networks on the Internet. One of the biggest social networks on the Internet is Twitter. It is always interesting to see new data visualizations around Twitter, especially those that reveal network effects.

Drew Conway, who will be speaking at the meetup, at Zero Intelligence Agents did a quick analysis of the Twitterers discussing the hashtag #rstats you can see here.

In the comments of that post I found what might be one of my favorite Twitter visualization tools, Mentionmap from Asteriq, the tool was just released on October 14. Users can put in any twitter username and see a network of twitter mentions, below are the results for TechCrunch.

Another of my favorite data sites, FlowingData, has also run down some neat Twitter visualizations that you can finder here.

Of course, there are plenty more out there you can find via Google.

I will leave you with an awesome visualization of when Twitter says Good Morning via Flowing Data via datavisualization.ch.