To follow on Andrew’s Baby Name Voyager post…The IA community has been following visual information representations for a while. See Peter Merholz’s blog on information visualization.

Currently the IA conversation has moved into the realm of defining IA in terms of where the boundaries are — IA design in space (as in a building), traffic, etc. It’s all information right? It’ll be interesting to see where this goes.

This is one of coolest Java applets I’ve seen lately. It’s also personal interest to me since my wife is due with our second this month. NameVoyager lets you type in a name and the application will respond with a real time graph that display’s that name’s rank among the most popular 1,000 names over the past century or so. The application pulls its data from the U.S. Social Security Administration’s database of baby names. (Thanks to Dan Frakes of MacWorld magazine for pointing this out this nifty app.)