Talking about data: sharing richly structured information through blogs and wikis

The web has dramatically enhanced people's ability to communicate ideas, knowledge, and opinions. But the authoring tools that most people understand, blogs and wikis, primarily guide users toward authoring text. In this work, we show that substantial gains in expressivity and communication would accrue if people could easily share richly structured information in meaningful visualizations. We then describe several extensions we have created for blogs and wikis that enable users to publish, share, and aggregate such structured information using the same workflows they apply to text. In particular, we aim to preserve those attributes that make blogs and wikis so effective: one-click access to the information, one-click publishing of content, natural authoring interfaces, and the ability to easily copy-and-paste information and visualizations from other sources.