Could these be the best data visualization projects of 2011? This list comes from Flowing Data, a site that explores how designers, statisticians, and computer scientists use data to understand the world better, mainly through data visualisation. The site has some excellent examples - visualising Facebook friendships on a map, the Better Life index, global fire observations. Watch the green spaces shrink in Africa and Australia as dry weather causes fires to break out.

A different top 20 is here, showing the rise in popularity of the infographic over the past year. How to get good at data visualisation? Take some advice from Visual.ly. The population explosion in the last 200 years - from 1 billion to 7 billion - is well-presented here.