I always called these waterfall charts - waterfall plots are something else in my mind and are very useful in examining spectra over time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_plot

I'm the submitter: yeah, looks like you are right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_chart - I just copied exactly the same title from the blog entry and I was unaware of the wrong "naming".

I didn't know this sort of thing had a name! I made a similar (but now that I look back on it, much less informative) chart using d3 here: http://neugierig.org/software/datavis/lines-spent/

maybe its because I'm not interested in the problem domain at hand but I find these unreadable messes.

I think it stands up reasonably well to the table (a decent test for a bad graphic). It provides a good overview of the data without obscuring it too much.

I wonder if this can be extended to produce candlestick charts [0]? The underlying concept is the same; candlesticks just have additional data points for volatility.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candlestick_chart

I work in finance and use waterfall charts quite a bit. They're a great way to create a walk through numbers and explain financial impacts/results. I just wish there was an easier way to implement them in Excel.