Celebrating the publication of a revised Death & Taxes poster (a visualization of the allocation of the U.S. budget) Seth Godin has a few words about the power of visualization:
Data is not useful until it becomes information, and that’s because data is hard for human beings to digest.
It is not possible to spend less than ten minutes looking at this, and more probably, you’ll be engaged for much longer. And it’s definitely not possible to walk away from it unchanged. That’s a lot to ask for a single sheet of paper, but that’s the power of visualizing data and turning it into information.
Read the (short) full text here.