Sparklines

Jon Udell recently posted about Sparklines :

Here, for example, is a sparkline showing monthly citations of LibraryLookup in del.icio.us since Jan 03: . I made this using Joe Gregorio's excellent sparkline service, by the way.

Grig has some cool examples as well:

Here is the per capita income in California from 1959 to 2003.
And here is the "real" per capita income (adjusted for inflation) in California, from 1959 to 2003.

Edward Tufte proposed Sparklines: "small, high-resolution graphics embedded in a context of works, numbers, images". The idea is to use small graphs to help us view trends and integrate them into the content. Tufte proposed them a few years ago, and it's neat to see them in the wild and supported on so many development platforms.

Jon Udell made use of a simple service which allows you to specify a sparkline using an image url with querystring parameters like this:

There's plenty of .NET code out there for creating Sparklines:

• E.W. Bachtal wrote an ASP.NET Sparkline Control
• Sean Gerety wrote an  XAML Sparkline Example