The beauty of the internet for those keen to understand consumer needs and desires is that people naturally express these in social networks and other social media.

iWant is a simple, experimental tool we’ve built to mine this info from the twitter stream. Give it a spin if you dare

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We recently pointed out this short clip of Dan Roam, author of The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures.

Here’s a much longer clip, courtesy of Google Talks…

That’s what Dan Roam says. And the result is that visual stimuli are far more persuasive in business than cold verbage or text. Another good reason to up the visualization quotient.

Dan writes the visualization blog Back of the Napkin. And in this clip, he uses visualization to help explain the Icahn/Yahoo! intervention on Fox Business.

Presentation designer and internationally acclaimed communications expert Garr Reynolds, creator of the most popular Presentation Zen, shares his experience in a provocative mix of illumination, inspiration, education, and guidance that will change the way you think about making presentations with PowerPoint or Keynote.

Presentation Zen challenges the conventional wisdom of making “slide presentations” in today’s world and encourages you to think differently and more creatively about the preparation, design, and delivery of your presentations. Garr shares lessons and perspectives that draw upon practical advice from the fields of communication and business. Combining solid principles of design with the tenets of Zen simplicity, this book will help you along the path to simpler, more effective presentations.

Part of the Authors@Google series

We likes powerful data visualization. After all, some of the best examples take data to a new level and help move people to action.

But not all applications are worth applying data viz to. In this video, Eric Rodenbeck, founder of design studio Stamen takes us through a few applications that do seem to make sense.

Based on live datasets, these involve Flickr, web 2.0 real estate site Trulia, and a SF Yellow Cab mapping initiative called Cabspotting.

One part we like is when Eric says that they’re not interested in the underlying technology, even though one of their team has developed the underlying software (and even better, made it open source).

You’ll find a much better writeup here, courtesy of Scribe Media, the folks who produced the video (and more besides).

Go here for the video (we couldn’t embed without it playing automatically when the page loaded, which slowed load times for everyone, never a good thing )

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