“Last year I decided to put on twist on my annual ‘best blogs’ post by taking a turn toward the obscure. Because blogs now pervade the media landscape, it makes little sense to write a post arguing that Huffington Post is better or worse than DailyKos — or Cute Overload.

It turned out that this change — pointing to lesser-known sites like History of the Button, Buzzfeed, and Indexed — was a rather auspicious. Within 24 hours of releasing the list, seven of the top ten links on Del.icio.us’ typically-tech-centric hotlist were sites on my list. And so in the spirit of celebrating the lesser-known, it’s time again to point toward the best blogs that might have flown under your radar. Here they are, the Best Blogs of 2007 that You Maybe Aren’t Reading…”

“This past October, the design community gathered in Denver for the 2007 AIGA Design Conference to talk about the future of design. What could be more ‘Next’ than the bright young talent of tomorrow? By now most everyone has heard about the wildly successful Command X, graphic design’s first ‘reality show,’ in which seven designers under 26 competed in daily design challenges, presenting their solutions on the conference main stage to be judged by an esteemed panel. All were impressive but one especially talented designer emerged: 24-year-old Nichelle Narcisi, whose youth-targeted voter awareness campaign, with the tagline ‘Except You,’ garnered a standing ovation and even tears from one of the jurors. Here, we spoke with this up-and-comer about her rise to AIGA stardom and why there’s no more room in her life for voter apathy.”

“I spent some time Saturday afternoon in Chelsea looking at a couple shows that I’ve been meaning to see for a while. I was pleasantly impressed with the painted maps by Paula Scher and somewhat underwhelmed by the theatrics that surrounded the collection of work from Banksy.”

“Tony Karrer wrote a post VizThink and Visual Thinking and Learning: Still not sure last week. It’s in reference to a conversation he was having with Tom Crawford, the CEO of VizThink about whether it would be valuable for e-learning professionals to attend the conference he is organizing in January.

Several of us who are facilitating at the conference responded, and a very interesting conversation developed… Dave Gray has been a leader in this field for many years, and his company Xplane has opened an office here in Portland. Dave joined in the conversation with Tony, and since he is a featured facilitator at the VizThink conference, Tom Crawford arranged for Dave and Tony to have an expanded discussion in a free webinar.”

• Topic: How is Visual Thinking Related to eLearning?
• Guests: Tony Karrer & Dave Gray
• Date: Thursday, December 20th, 2008
• Time: 8am Pacific, 10am Central, 4pm GMT
• Cost: FREE

“The sketchboard is a low-fi technique that makes it possible for designers to explore and evaluate a range of interaction concepts while involving both business and technology partners. Unlike the process that results from wireframe-based design, the sketchboard quickly performs iterations on many possible solutions and then singles out the best user experience to document and build upon.”

The Alphabetizer puts just about any list in alphabetical order with options to strip HTML, ignore case, make all lowercase, capitalize first word, remove duplicates, reverse list, randomize and/or ignore indefinite airticles.

Check out the short animated, “infographicy” film “Duelity,” by Marcos Ceravolo and Ryan Uhrich:

According to the records of the General Organization of Development labs (GOD) it took a mere six days to manufacture a fully-operational universe, complete with day, night, flora and fauna, and installing Adam as its manager to oversee daily functions on Earth.

That’s one story.

If thou shalt believe the Book of Darwin, t’is five billion years after The Big Bang that we behold what the cosmos hath begat; the magma, the terra firma, the creeping beats, and mankind, whose dolorous and chaotic evolution begat the gift of consciousness.

Duelity is a split-screen animation that tells both sides of the story of Earth’s origins in a dizzying and provocative journey through the history and language that marks human thought.

From one of the guys who put together ChartChooser: “Here’s something we came up with to help you consider which chart to use. It was inspired by the table in Gene Zelazny’s classic work Saying It With Charts.”

Fun-looking mail art project.

“Brian Dettmer carves into books revealing the artwork inside, creating complex layered three-dimensional sculptures.” (Thanks Airbag!)

“Google released a chart generator service they are calling the Google Chart API. Usage is quite straightforward: you link to an image in the form of a parameterized URL and Google returns a PNG graphic containing the chart.”

“confess. if you read this blog, you are addicted to data. this means you do not like Christmas presents. in fact, you hate those information-less presents your friends buy you each year. even after patiently telling them ‘any present should self-update at least each 30 seconds’, last year’s Christmas was still a disaster, despite that wireless weather station from your wife that is now measuring the temperature & humidity of those boxes on your attic.

starting from $15, here are infosthetics’ 20 most wanted Christmas gifts for the info-addicted.”

“Who was this person that said you had to wait for inspiration to start making something?” Yeah!

“Paul McHenry Roberts (1917-1967) taught college English for over twenty years, first at San Jose State College and later at Cornell University. He wrote numerous books on linguistics, including Understanding Grammar (1954), Patterns of English (1956), and Understanding English (1958).”

“As it turns out, though, it appears that most of these examples probably wouldn’t be considered “information visualization” by the “information visualization” community represented by the InfoVis conference, presumably because, for the most part, they aren’t designed as tools with which you do rigorous analytic work.”