Two of the biggest recent trends for sharing and marketing content have been infographics and data visualisations. Not a day goes by without an infographic being shared which shows social networking stats, mobile stats, stats about stats and other stats in a graphical form. They’re useful for raising awareness, driving some direct traffic, and have also been used to create backlinks to sites by including the details in any embed code which is being used.

The other side of the graphical data coin is data visualisations, whether they’re being produced as bespoke creations by someone like David McCandless, or as entirely automated processes, such as LinkedIn Labs new InMaps, which visualises all the professional networks you’ve created by connecting with other people on LinkedIn. Allow them access to your account and you get a lovely spirograph type affair.

Now, it’s definitely very pretty, but it’s hard to define how to use it effectively to achieve anything. While I may just be a grumpy writer, data visualisations theoretically allow anyone with the some programming ability to produce them, and there are increasing ways to get hold of interesting data and repurpose it.

In the case of infographics, my annoyance is usually if I’m on a slow connection and waiting ages to see a collection of numbers which could have also been put into text, and would then allow me to quote (as fair use and with links back) without having to retype it all in. With data visualisation tools, my annoyance is that sometimes they’re worth doing just to make something you could hang on a wall but often they don’t go beyond that. And I’m not knocking data as art, but take the LinkedIn example.

I’ve got a shedload of contacts on LinkedIn, and I can now see areas where there could be some mutual benefits in introducing people from one apparently siloed area to another. That’s quite useful, although the sheer number of people on that graph makes it still difficult to see who I should be introducing to other people.

So why not make it so I can drag and drop people to create the introductions, rather than going back into LinkedIn, finding person A, and then finding person B?

There’s a handy sidebar if you click on a name, which brings up their mini-profile, but that’s just giving me more information, not ways to do anything with it.

And it appears that aside from the light green and purple extrusions, which represent networks predominantly from Bauer Media and Absolute Radio, everyone else I know is in a big jumble of social media/marketing/PR/mobile – which partly makes sense because of the ultimately quite small world of digital technology in the UK, but is also a real pain to navigate and to be unable to recategorise.

There are two battles here:

1. The battle to make more and more data available in an open way for people to be able to use – even data which traditionally may have seemed highly secretive. I’m not suggesting you share absolutely everything to anyone, but there’s bound to be masses of information you’re currently hoarding and not using which could result in important business insights if someone externally started to play around with it and discover meaning from it.

2. The battle to utilise that data in more meaningful ways. Mapping and graphing are useful, and the interconnectedness of a lot of data provides a massive challenge, but unless you’re purely doing it as an artistic endeavour, then try to let me at least do something with it? It doesn’t have to be rocket science, but if you’ve produced something like InMaps, just pause and imagine the first response people are going to have when they see it, and the first thing that will spring into their mind to try and do with it.