A fan diagram can be used to display information about a collection of sequences of differing length.
In [LiveFan], this sort of diagram represents threads of discussion on a message board.
Appears to be gone as of 2004 Jan. A search at http://graphics.lcs.mit.edu/liveweb/ for "liveweb" also turned up nothing. A search on Google turnedup the following article describing the project, though: http://smg.media.mit.edu/papers/Xiong/liveweb_sig99.pdf
So, what's a fan diagram?
CategoryInformationVisualization