Swarm and stack my news

So, I've been a big fan of Digg for some time now, although I go through effectively sinusoidal phases in the frequency of my visits. Yesterday I stumbled onto intriguing ways to visualize the data that's being collected by Digg.

Swarm & Stack are two ways Digg has created to show which articles are being "dugg" by users. Each has it's merit, but I think Swarm might be my favorite.

Swarm shows Digg users as they move from one Digg story to the next. This is interesting as you can follow the stream of conciousness of another human being as they read their news. Also, you can see stories that tend to congregate users around them if you watch long enough.

Stack has it's own quirks, as diggs fall from the top of the screen onto the story and pile up as you're watching. They stories are color coded for how many diggs they have, but as the stack grows taller you know that in the time you've been watching that this story has been dug much more than the others. It's something like viewing the acceleration of one story over another, something Digg has had in some form for quite some time.

I guess the things I found most interesting about all of this was the possibility of visually mining information. It's intriguing to me because Digg presents this information in two very easy to digest forms, and allows one of the human brain's most evolved functions, pattern recognition, to really show off.

P.S. I'm trying to get better at this. Let's see how long this lasts. :) Two days in a row.