OK my inner design geek is going to come out now.

As a designer that works with interactive content, web enabled content, and content that links back to and through social media, I’ve often wanted a way to visually track the sharing of content. I want to be able to see what happens when a piece of content is shared, and how that shared content propagates across the social media sphere.

The New York Times R and D lab have done just that. Using Processing they have developed a dynamic visual application ( Cascades ) to track what happens with each article published on the New York Times website. The video below explains it.