So I'm completely fascinated by the metadata visualization tools surrounding sites like Flickr, del.icio.us, et al. As we keep collecting this kind of metadata on mindshare and meme attraction over time, we're going to be able to go back and examine thought trends — not to mention examining them in real-time — in a way that's completely unprecedented. There are still a lot of questions to shake out about what the data means — but that's precisely the fun part.

Michal Migurski's Vox Delicii is precisely fun. It's a Flash-based near-realtime visualization of the most popular links posted to del.icio.us, sorted by date and popularity. The size of each color chip correlates with the relative coverage of that item on a given day, based on samples taken hourly. Green indicates the link has grown in mindshare while red indicates the reverse, and chips are arranged in order of first appearance on del.icio.us — farther to the left is older, to the right is newer.

The project is an adaptation of a similar project that heat-mapped Google News from Spring 2004 to Summer 2005, but Migurski chose to switch the data source to del.icio.us popular because of its greater transparency as a source, and its better representation of "bottoms-up" mindshare as opposed to Google news's mindshare, largely influenced by major news outlets and their stockholders.