The New York Times has been putting a great emphasis on public consumption of data, from understanding data to access to data. They initially started with information graphics that visualized complex data sets into something easy to digest. The nytimes.com versions were also interactive, engaging the reader to understand the data in more depth. A few weeks back, APIs were released to allow developers access to the same data that NY Times has.
Now they are taking it a step further partnering with IBM’s Many Eyes team to combine NY Times’ data with the Many Eyes visualization application. Users are now enabled to render data against multiple types of visualizing techniques.
Great effort by NY Times to put data and tools in the hands of their readers.