I usually just do a year-end list of The Best Infographics and many other topics, but it gets a little crazy having to review all of my zillion posts at once. So, to make it easier for me — and perhaps, to make it a little more useful to readers — I’m going to start publishing mid-year lists, too. These won’t be ranked, unlike my year-end “The Best…” lists, and just because a site appears on a mid-year list doesn’t guarantee it will be included in an end-of-the-year one. But, at least, I won’t have to review all my year’s posts in December…

Infographics show data in a visual way, and make the information much more accessible for English Language Learners — and everybody else. Interactive infographics are especially engaging because they allow users to customize the data they see. You’ll find both kinds in this list.

You might also be interested in:

The Best Infographics — 2010

The Best Interactive Infographics — 2009

The Best Sources For Interactive Infographics.

The Best Resources For Creating Infographics

The Best Resources For Learning About “Word Clouds”

Not “The Best,” But “A List” Of Mindmapping, Flow Chart Tools, & Graphic Organizers

The Best Tools To Make Simple Graphs Online

The Best Sites For Learning About Cartograms

The Best Map-Making Sites On The Web

The Best Posts To Help Understand Google’s New “Books Ngram Viewer”

Here are my choices of The Best Infographics Of 2011 — So Far:

How Do You Spend Your Day? is a neat Wall Street Journal interactive that’s similar to previous ones you’ll find at The Best Infographics — 2010. It’s based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing how the average American…spends his/her day. The difference in this one, though, is first you put your own data in saying how you spend your day. After you submit it, you’re compared with the average info.

Here are two different “Life expectancy across the U.S.” interactive maps showing every county in the country. One is from The Washington Post and the other is from Health Metrics.

The world’s favourite foods is a very interesting interactive map from The Guardian. I’m adding it to The Best Sites For Learning About The World’s Different Cultures.

60 Seconds on the Web represents everything that happens on the Internet every minute. I’m adding it to The Best Sites To Learn About The Internet.

The Opportunity Gap is an infographic from GOOD. I’m adding it to The Best Resources About Wealth & Income Inequality.

I’ve previously posted about extraordinary interactive infographics made by the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times that show how people in the United States spend their time. Now, The Economist has published a chart that compares and contrasts this kind of data among different countries.

Where Did My Tax Dollars Go? is an interactive infographic that is the winner of a Google-sponsored context to identify the best tax-related visualization. It’s pretty darned impressive. Type in whatever amount of income you want, and you get a very detailed an accessible explanation of how it’s used.

The Guardian newspaper created a great word cloud infographic showing The Books Everyone Must Read. They used “the results of over 15 notable book polls, readers surveys and top 100’s.”

It’s the Inequality, Stupid is from Mother Jones and has eleven infographics.

Animated Infographic: Which Countries Are Happiest? comes from GOOD Magazine.

Voxy has produced a great infographic titled Why It Pays To Be Bilingual.

“Our Connected World” is an infographic with some interesting information about Internet usage around the world.

Arab spring: an interactive timeline of Middle East protests comes from The Guardian.

Weight of the world is a fascinating interactive infographic from The Washington Post that lets you see how people in different countries have gained weight over the past thirty years.

“Dangers Of Obesity” is a well-done infographic from a Florida newspaper.

“The State Of The Internet: Summing Up 2010” is an infographic with some pretty amazing statistics.

“How The Recession Has Changed Us” is what I think is a pretty amazing infographic from The Atlantic.

How Much is a College Degree Worth? is an infographic that shows various economic advantages of having a college degree.

This Tract is an amazing way to access U.S. Census data in a visual form. It uses info from the 2000 Census right now, but, apparently, will change to the new 2010 data soon.

Walled World is a fascinating infographic showing how our world is divided by real walls, income walls, and political walls.

“Glass Half Empty: The Coming Water Wars” is an infographic reviewing the water crisis in different parts of the world.

Yahoo has created an infographic showing the year of 2010 in review. It really isn’t very good for communicating information about what actually happened. However, it would be a great model to show to students, and then have them create an infographic about their own year. It could serve as a graphic organizer for further writing — after students make the major points in the infographic using categories, they could write sentences about the items in each category, turn the sentences into paragraphs, and the paragraphs into essays. It’s basically a version of the Picture Word Inductive Model, which I’ve written about extensively in this blog and in my book on teaching English Language Learners.

Create A Better Life Index lets you, without having to register, create an infographic emphasizing the qualities that you believe are key for a “better life” and showing how different countries in the world are doing in those areas. You can then share your infographic with others. It’s from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

State Of The Internet 2011 is a pretty darn impressive interactive infographic telling you everything you would want to know about the Internet in the world today.

I also have to mention the great post on infographics at The New York Times Learning Network, Data Visualized: More on Teaching With Infographics.

And, finally, I need to include something about the new website Visual.ly, which began this year and is a source of great infographics and new tools to easily create them.

Feedback is welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to look at the 700 other “The Best…” lists and consider subscribing to this blog for free.