Tech trends: visualizing the Internet

Here are a few fun/interesting tech trends of the day. Making the Internet a more visual experience - and less of a text overload - seems to be on quote a few minds:

SEARCH: Cooliris has a cool tool out that lets you scan through photos and search results on a massive, 3-D wall of images. This spawned a Fortune magazine story about the future of search engines: will they always be text-based? Perhaps not.

BLOGS: There are several stories out about new government data that says there are now more paid bloggers in the country than there are paid lawyers. Not that they make the same kind of cash, although the Wall Street Journal says a blogger with 100,000 unique visitors per month can make $75,000 per year.

MAPS: IRLConnect is trying to make a name for itself with map-based social media. Using the site, you can pull in your Facebook and Twitter accounts to get a visual representation of what your posse is up to.

GOOGLE: Finally, in case you haven't seen it, Google's News Timeline is worth a look. You can pull in RSS feeds to make a weekly news timeline of your own.