Information Aesthetics

Here are some resources I found useful (on top of Tufte):

1. Work of Alberto Cairo: http://www.thefunctionalart.com.
2. Searching Pintrest for UI/UX, dashboard, information design related keywords.
3. Work of Ben Fry and Fathom: http://fathom.info.
4. Work of Georgia Lupi and Accurat: http://giorgialupi.net and http://www.accurat.it.
5. Infosthetics Blog: http://infosthetics.com.
6. Work of Gregor Aisch from New York Times: http://driven-by-data.net
7. Information Graphics book from Taschen: http://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/design/all/04984/facts.information_graphics.htm

The last one is a huge brick with many interesting and/or beautiful examples and it also exists as iBook for about $10!

The above resources contain another set of links to great many sources of inspiration...

Unfortunately, InformationIsBeautiful.net basically exists to be an advertisement for the author's book, The Visual Miscellaneum. Which is a very pretty book--I own it--but not really full of informative infographics. There's some original content in the blog, but far too much of it is reposts of graphics from the book.

For a better (or at least more varied) selection of infographics I like:

* Chart Porn (http://chartporn.org/)

* Flowing Data (http://flowingdata.com/) which also covers datavis software

* Information Aesthetics (http://infosthetics.com/)

* We Love DataVis (http://datavis.tumblr.com/)

(edit: formatting)

Here's a discussion on metafilter:
http://ask.metafilter.com/56228/Alternatives-to-a-tag-cloud

You can find more experimental UI elements at infographics sites and various visualization lab sites:
http://infosthetics.com/
http://labs.digg.com/
http://sandbox.yahoo.com/Experiments (it used to be much better before they cut a bunch of projects)
http://www.etsy.com/buy.php

I understand that you're probably looking for an established alternative; however, most solutions need to be appropriate to the situation. Feel free to email me and maybe I can help you brainstorm.

Aside of the content, interesting things to do with both these and the state department cables would be to study patterns in the metadata like transmission date/time vs geographic location. Wikileaks has them sorted by various criteria, is anyone aware of a good platform for wrangling this to visualize it different ways? Most of the offerings at http://infosthetics.com/archives/2010/11/wikileaks_us_embassy_cables_the_visualizations.html are deprecated or dead.

Hopefully they fix the usability issues they introduced quickly. I'm a long time user and I might bail. More feedback here:

"Suggestions and ideas: What do you dislike about the new design?"
http://support.delicious.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=193&page=3

Maybe contact Bernard as well:

Bernard Kerr, lead designer user experience designer @ delicious
http://infosthetics.com/archives/2008/04/bernard_kerr_yahoo_talk.html