The May 2008 issue of german PAGE magazin focussed on interactive information design. It’s the cover story, therefore the topic gets highlighted quite accurate.
The bottom line is: A change in the way we perceive information is happening right now, and the reason is web. I do emphasize this: With the help of accessible, structured databases and visualizing tools like Actionscript and Processing, there is more to charts then a bar graph.

Never before there was so much data to absorb and manage as it is today. Jens Franke talks about a generation of fresh designers who encounter the flood of information and the rising urge for knowlegde, using new, interactive media.

A few cool links from this essay:

British History Timeline The history of Britain broken down into bite-size chunks. Flash tool by which you can browse historical events or take a guided tour on topics such as Slavery or Technology.	Marumushis Newsmap Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator.
Relation Browser: Visualization Toolbox for creating your own visual context system – based on a planetary design, ergo: circular shaped icons. This geographical demo was created in order to demonstrate the visualizations’s capabilities by displaying the CIA world factbook information about countries, continents and oceans.	Well-formed data | Elastic lists Example of the elastic list principle for browsing multi-facetted data structures, based on a Noble prize winners dataset.Elastic lists enhance traditional facet browsing approaches by visualizing relative proportions of metadata values by size and by brightness.

Unfortunately the essay is not yet available online.
You have to wait or order the printed issue here: PAGE magazine
The .PDF for download will be available around July 2008.