When visualizations go wrong

Sometimes information visualization goes wrong. We quickly confuse whizzy fun visuals with using visuals to make explaining things easier. Here's a recent example.

Michael VanDaniker used the open source data-viz toolkit Axiis, grabbed the data from w3schools.com for browsershare, and made the chart below. He explains in nice detail how he did it. To be fair, I suspect his goal was just to show off the toolkit, not necessarily to make a useful or usable chart. Much of his blog is well written...