By @carnby (Eduardo Graells Garrido).
The idea behind this visualization is to leverage the power of tools that analyze trends in Search Engine Queries, such as Google Trends and Yahoo! Clues. On the left, we see a stacked area chart with different variables from M-Lab (all normalized in order for the grouping to make sense). On the right, we see query volumes that relate to real world events that have a correlation with drops in internet quality measures.
In this design, I didn't use small multiples for the M-Lab data because the purpose is not to compare those variables. Here, the idea is to make a "global" visual indicator of internet quality, by mixing relevant indicators and putting them together in he same graph (this is another reason for the normalization of each variable). So, what is really important in the left part of the visualization is the total area used by each indicator.
The query volume plots use a small multiples approach, because we want to make clear that each event relates to the internet quality (they may be related between them but it is not a direct interest of ours). Also, each query volume has a orange dot that encourages mouse interaction. This dot has two purposes: 1) to mark the more relevant (in terms of volume) date of the query volume, and 2) to give a link to a news article related to the event.
This visualization is a mockup. It uses real data on the indicators visualization, but it is not fully interactive yet and it generates random data for the interesting queries.