Booking flights became so much easier when it all shifted online, but it hasn’t changed in years. You put in your preferred dates and times and you get a long list of options. Oftentimes those listings can be a pain as you browse through all of your options. Oh the burden of choice. Hipmunk tries to make flight search easier with a visual interface.

As usual, you enter your origin and destination but instead of plain HTML tables, you get something like the above, and you can sort the options from least to greatest amount of agony. Rectangle lengths represent flight times and are color-coded by airline. Flights with the same take off and arrival times, but priced higher are hidden to help you narrow down quicker.

Hipmunk is still in the early stages, but a quick search shows a lot of promise.

[Hipmunk via Matt]

from FlowingData by Nathan Yau

For this year’s MTV Video Music Awards, the music channel collaborated with Twitter and the good folks at Stamen to track social media activity throughout the event. The MTV VMA Twitter Tracker ranks the participating artists based on the amount of Tweets per minute. The application offers three different views on the incoming Tweets, All Activity, Top 4 and Single Artist. The user can tweet directly from the Flash based application to support his favorite artist.

The application is solely focused in the amount of Tweets does not go into more detail about location or sentiment. I think these attributes would have been interesting to include and could also provide more insights into what’s happening on stage.

Geoff McGhee has been producer at nytimes.com, head of multimedia at Le Monde and now John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. These years at San Francisco are being productive, as we can see on this fantastic documentary about data visualization on the media.

Journalism in the Age of Data from Geoff McGhee on Vimeo.

My recommendation is that you visit the original site to watch the movie in an interactive way.

By “Inforgraphics news”