Beautiful data

The amount of data on any given topic is rising nearly exponentially. Online media and social sites give an incomparable statistical and empirical insight into the inner workings of groups of human beings.
So there's a need to visualize large amounts of data, complex relationships and correlations and to do that often and nearly en passant.
There's a really interesting article in Smashing Magazine, a graphics designer online publication showing new methods, forms and algorithms to show mndmaps, news, data, connections and web sites. Plus it contains a large appendix with links and references to further delve into the thematics. I was really impressed.
All those beautiful data visualization techniques made me think about the importance of usability issues in visualization: complex data sets or relations are no longer the domain of some highly specialized experts but will enter the real life of a larger group of possibly technically adept but not specialized people. Every decent personal computer has the cpu power and graphical ability to create sophisticated graphs and let its user interact with it in real time.
There only needs to be a set of tools enabling easy creation and usage of such graphs and more important, there need to be new ways to show the more complex findings in such data in an eye pleasing way. The more beautiful and self explaining visualizations are, the more useful they are for viewers/users.
I'm very interested, what the future will show concerning tools and visual representations of data. Please let me know what you think and if you know of any other new ways to display data.