Steve Outing, columnist at Editor&Publisher.com, says "interactive graphics" is what online news need in a recent column. These "clickable info-graphics", or interactives as CNN.com calls them is an interesting Web genre. Normally done in Flash, they are direct remediations of these explanatory mixes of drawings, photos, texts and arrows we find in papers and magazines. "Visual Explanations", Edward Tufte calls them, while Richard Saul Wurman presented lots of them in the book Infomation Architects. I guess part of Information Design is about making such.
To me, most of the "interactive" kind is just like the paper version. The interactivity just makes up for the low resolution of the computer screen. On paper, all information could easily fit into on spread, while on the computer, large parts have to be hidden to ensure visibility of other parts. A CNN example: Who's Producing the World's Oil? Another example: VG Nett has two different versions of the same graphic, explaining the site of a triple murder. One is made for print, the other for the Web. Both have exactly the same images and text, but in the Web version, the explanatory text is displayed as rollover popups. It is even possible to argue with Tufte that a version that shows all the text simultaneously (preferably with arrows, not numbers) is better, as it allows for direct comparisons, which to Tufte is a key function of information design.
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Gráphicos interactivos