My son may be sent to Afghanistan as part of the Canadian ISAF Contribution which makes looking at these data more important to me.  I am very impressed with how the UK Guardian Data Blog shares the datasets the paper compiles with its stories and I have been having a great time experimenting with IBM’s ManyEyes.

First I was looking at the UK Guardian Story How many troops does each country send to Afghanistan?  In particular their Afghanistan map of Where the Troops are.

I used the Guardian’s date to create the following visualization:
Tag Cloud which nicely sandwiched the worlds contribution between United and States.

TreeMap which unfortunately lacks colour but does adequately shows the proportion of the contributions

and

a Global Map of who is contributing which I think is very useful and telling of who is in and who is not.

and

a Bubblechart, which shows the proportions again, with colour, however, I find that bubbles makes the story seem a less serious than it actually is