Remember when AOL leaked 650,000 of its users’ search queries? For the first time, we got to see what real peo­ple search for on the web.

Now, thanks to Search Suggestion tech­nol­ogy by Google, Yahoo, and oth­ers, you don’t have to wait for a cor­po­rate screw-up to expose search queries — you can do it your­self! Just type a few let­ters, and watch the most pop­u­lar searches appear on top.

Questions & Answers is my lat­est project: an exper­i­ment in new, non-linear nar­ra­tive forms, or what I’m call­ing data-as-narrative. But really it’s just a fun way to explore some of the crazy, inter­est­ing stuff peo­ple write online.

I gen­er­ated this image from the genetic code of a California case of H1N1 (posted today by the CDC). I fed the data into my color tools project, and assigned one color for each base found in DNA: ade­nine (A), cyto­sine (C), gua­nine (G) and thymine (T). The col­ors were cho­sen by search­ing ColourLovers for each of those base names and using the top result, i.e. the “best” col­ors for A, C, G, and T, accord­ing to ColourLovers.

I’ve been think­ing about how best to aural­ize data. I real­ize that’s not a real word (yet), but con­sider aural­iza­tion to be visu­al­iza­tion’s audi­tory sib­ling. The music video by Johannes Kreidler above, while hokey, is both inno­v­a­tive and entertaining.

Add Chris Jordan to the list of peo­ple I want to meet.