Navigating the Web with Microsoft Pivot

I love playing with new technologies and gadgets. I recently installed Microsoft Pivot, a cool new technology…it’s almost like an Excel pivot table with Web image search. Pivot is a research experiment from Live Labs that allows people to visualize data and then sort, organize and categorize it dynamically.

Anyone can download and install Pivot; you just need Windows Vista or Windows 7 with Internet Explorer 8 and Silverlight. We’ve created dozens of sample galleries where you can go play with Web data from Wikipedia and on topics such as world leaders, endangered species, sports teams, movies and more. So, for example, if you go into the Sports Illustrated covers, you can sort by cover date, by sport, by athlete, by team, by event, etc.

Pivot really puts the Web in the World Wide Web…so as opposed to the Web being just a collection of pages not linked in any way, Pivot can help show the relationships between items and information so you can begin to extract insights from the mounds of data you uncover...so it's not just search and browsing. I think this could make research for students much more interesting.

Check out the video below to see how Pivot works. And if you missed it, I recently blogged about other data visualization technologies from Microsoft that are relevant to education here.