Ask Jeeves is conducting a limited test of a new search preview feature offering searchers a graphical peek at their results, no clicking necessary. http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3367361
New York-based Viewpoint Corporation is offering similar "graphically enhanced search" technology in the form of a toolbar plug-in. It launched in March 2004, and uses search results from Yahoo! Canada's Smartdevil ( http://labs.thumbshots.com/ ),has long been pushing graphical previews, which it calls Thumbshots, in Web search results.

"(map-making) is the art of the imaginary par excellence - an art free of all limits imposed by words, an art that touches the depth of human existence, an art of images (sounds) that crosses all borders. From/after The Language of Graphics: the lecture by Yuri Engelhardt ( http://www.yuriweb.com/ ); http://www.iua.upf.es/activitats/semirec/LanguageofGraphics/

’An art of sound that crosses all borders’; http://mondediplo.com/2004/06/07barenboim

"When you put a sign on the freeway, people will read it, until someone takes it down".(Depending on its size, content and placement it can be seen by hundreds of thousands of people).
http://www.freewayblogger.com/ When the intellectuals and politicians fail, it's time for the artists to step in.

Colin Ware's "Information Visualization" and Alan MacEachren's "How Maps Work" which are more analytical and better theoretically founded than Ed Tufte's books, and share by some
accident the common project of synthesising cognitive science insights with semiotics.