I intend to include more quantitative data here on SolidQuant, and Google Chart API makes that easy to do on-the-fly. Today, the team added ability to create sparklines, which I think is a very good visualization method. For example, declining gold price is a hot topic this morning. I can show the trend very economically using sparkline: This way, data can be shown without disrupting the text flow too much, and it is still clear that the recent drop is small dip in a fast rising price. A full graph would be: (again with Google Chart)

Data has to be encoded, and I found the easiest way to do it is with the many free tools available. The above is prepared using James B. Allen’s Google Chart Creator.