Another topic I’m watching closely is data visualization. Here’s an excerpt from an article I found at SmashingMagazine.com:

Data presentation can be beautiful, elegant and descriptive. There is a variety of conventional ways to visualize data - tables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs are being used every day, in every project and on every possible occasion. However, to convey a message to your readers effectively, sometimes you need more than just a simple pie chart of your results. In fact, there are much better, profound, creative and absolutely fascinating ways to visualize data. Many of them might become ubiquitous in the next few years.

Information Architects Japan, for example, created a mindmap to visualize the 200 most successful websites on the Internet (click on the image to enlarge):

Time Magazine uses visual hills to show the density of American population in its map and Forbes Magazine uses visual hills to show the density of millionaires in the USA.

There are lots of possible ways to visualize data, some of which are described in the article mentioned above - worth the read!