Pearltrees visualization tools add power to search and discovery

Nearly four years ago, I spent a week at a multimedia bootcamp at UC Berkeley put on by the Knight Digital Media Center. It was a wonderful experience, not only because of the practical skills I picked up but also because my team was assigned to interview Jeff Heer, then a graduate student studying data visualization. Our finished multimedia package was rough around the edges, but had some great visuals and detail on Heer's quest to help people understand the power of social relationships on the distribution of information.

I immediately thought of Heer when I started poking around with a new social-visualization tool called Pearltrees that's currently in beta. It's a completely different way of organizing content, a mix of old-school bookmarking and drag-and-drop organizing to fit the new, flexible world of Web 2.0 and 3.0. Here's a snapshot of content dealing with Android software.

As we create more and more data, search becomes more and more important. Textual search is only the beginning -- visualizing online searches are becoming more important because social connections behind the data can add new layers of trust and relevance. That's because you might be more likely to trust information created or vetted by people you know rather than the masses. Google gets this, and is just starting to introduce social search at the bottom of its results pages. As time goes on and the quality of searches is refined, we'll see that presentation gain more prominence, and perhaps offered as an alternative UI. 

In the meantime, it's fun to tinker around with tools like Pearltrees that place a sense of "discovery" front and center. It's hard to describe the concept with words, so I've attached a lengthy but detailed video to guide you through the possibilities. But, knowing 30-minute videos are too long for most people, I'd encourage you to just jump in and start playing.