Visualizing weblog conversations (see Judith Meskill and Mary Hodder)
means tracking a meme from blogger to blogger. Who linked to whom? Who
quoted but failed to link? Who said what first? How fast and how far
did the conversation spread?
Visualizing search results is less ambitious–sometimes a good
thing. Dropping cannon balls from the Leaning Tower of Pisa is less
ambitious than launching millionaire space tourists, but the stuff
you learn from one benefits the other…Not that Judith and Mary are
launching space tourists–sorry, irresistible wise-guy impulse there.
If one picture is worth a thousand words, that’s probably because words
get processed in linear sequence but pictures end up on your retina,
which has billions and billions [TM]* of generations of tricks for
processing two-dimensional information in order not to get eaten.
Here are a few sample interesting ways to display search results:
Geographical (works only if search results contain geographical info):
Mikel Maron’s WorldKit (Sample: Phil Wilson’s British blogger map)
GeOrkut mapper of Orkut friendship nets (closed down, alas, but here’s a sample.)
Word-linked:
Kartoo (you can play with this one online)
Touchgraph (interesting static samples)
Haven’t tried these:
Grokker/Groxis (looks Boolean)
Inxight (This looks more like a
very good database than a visualizer per se. It’s a commercial app with
some really big customers including the Department of Defense.)
Leave a comment to let me know about some of the billions and billions more–
* “Billions and billions [TM]” technical term in Betsy-speak meaning “lots and lots and I don’t plan to look up how many.”