Back in May, at the SIGCHI Social Viz Workshop, I cornered Martin Wattenberg for a few moments and bounced the following idea off of him. One of the interesting results of the Baby NameVoyager was that the visualizations had become social media: artifacts to be created, discussed, and shared in groups. This despite zero support for collaboration built into the system. I also posited that there could be a lot of interesting research issues to follow pursuing this line of thinking.
Wattenberg and his colleague Fernanda Viégas seem to be picking up the ball, and have issued a manifesto on Communication-Minded Visualization (PDF). I don't know if I planted a seed (actually I highly doubt it since Martin and Fernanda are both twice as smart as me and were probably already headed in this direction), but I'll be interested to see if this coalesces into a research community. There's lots of fun challenges, from the systems aspects of just getting something to work, to the visual and interactive design issues, to the investigation of social effects given such visualizations.
In addtion to reading the paper, you can also get an audio recording and slides from Fernanda's presentation on "Democratizing Visualization" at idea2006.
I know what you're thinking. All I can say is Life Changes (TM). Big Time. Things seem to be easing up a bit but no guarantees.