Cool Tools and Gadgets: Visualization

bubbl.us is a free and simple web application that lets you brainstorm online. Allows you to create colorful mind maps, share and work with friends, embed your mind map in a blog or website, email and print your mind map, and save your mindmap as an image.

Creately is an easy-to-use online diagramming application that is built for collaboration. Ideal for teams working together on diagrams and designs.

Cacoo is a user friendly online drawing tool that allows you to create a variety of diagrams such as site maps, wire frames, UML and network charts. Multiple users can work on and complete the same diagram simultaneously.

Online drag and drop editing platform that helps you design presentations, social media graphics, posters, and more. Share your creations online or download as PNG, PDF, or JPEG

Easelly is a free, theme-based web application for creating infographics and data visualizations.

Gliffy provides pre-built templates to help you create professional-looking diagrams including: Flow Charts, Network diagrams, Floor plans, Org charts, Venn diagrams, SWOT analysis, Wireframes, Site maps, UML, Business process modeling, Technical drawings. The free version allows users to create 5 diagrams.

Display live data on your site with Google interactive charts and data tools.

Infogr.am is an easy to use online service that lets you create, share, discover infographics and online charts. Allows you to use or import your own data when building your infographics.

Robust online diagram application that helps you create flowcharts from a variety of templates. Allows collaboration, cross-platform compatibility, and charts can be shared as webpages, images or PDFs. Free and premium accounts available.

Mind42 lets you create comprehensive mind maps with a fast and simple online mind map editor. Maps can be shared and edited simultaneously. Web-application, no download required.

Infographics made easy – create data visualizations with charts, graphs and maps. Data can be imported using xls, xlsx, csv files or Google spreadsheets. Free and Pro accounts available

Create mind maps, content portals, organizational charts, lesson plans, and more.

Create interactive maps and graphs.

Create interactive graphs, dashboards, maps and tables from virtually any data and embed them on your website or blog.

Everything you need to create and publish infographics: charts, maps and icons. Free and premium accounts available.

Raw is a free online data visualization tool. Primarily conceived as a tool for designers and vis geeks, Raw allows to export visualizations in vector (SVG) or raster (PNG) format and embed them in your web page.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to your own desktop to use as you wish.

TagCrowd is a web application for visualizing word frequencies in any text by creating what is popularly known as a word cloud, text cloud or tag cloud. TagCrowd specializes in making word clouds easy to read, analyze and compare, for a variety of useful purposes, including: as topic summaries for speeches and written works, for visual analysis of qualitative data, for data mining a text corpus, for helping writers and students reflect on their work, and as visual poetry.

Timetoast allows people to create interactive timelines, which they can share anywhere on the web. Anyone can join Timetoast and start creating and sharing their own timelines, all they need is a valid email address.

MindMeister brings the concept of mind mapping to the web, using its facilities for real-time collaboration to allow truly global brainstorming sessions. Users can create, manage and share mind maps online and access them anytime, from anywhere. In brainstorming mode, fellow MindMeisters from around the world (or just in different rooms) can simultaneously work on the same mind map and see each other's changes as they happen.

Draw, create & share! Sketchpad is a one of a kind web-based sketching tool for teachers, students, artists, and other individuals. It is simple to use, yet has extensive features to fit a range of design needs.