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Blog under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
Feb
21
(2007)
Dynamic Relationship Mapping for a Defined Set of Websites
Filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: mapping, moosecamp, northernvoice, nv07, thoughts.
I'm sitting in the kitchen here at Casa del Lamb, and we're bashing around some ideas for mashups and cool ways to display data for MooseCamp and Northern Voice. We just had (what I think is) a really cool idea. What if we could take the OPML file from the planet.northernvoice.ca aggregator (which contains a reference to many/most of the blogs representing the people attending the conference), and run some analysis on that to figure out what the relationships and subgroups are within the larger group of Northern Voice Attendees.
Ideally, it would be some kind of self-running and/or interactive application, capable of being left running on a projected screen in the foyer during the conference, updating (either live or periodically) to show how relationships change as people post items to their blogs, and possible add (or remove) links to each other's blogs.
This would become a form of social zeitgeist – possibly showing how the group dynamics change over the the course of the conference (and afterward).
I've done some preliminary poking around in the internets to find possible prior art, and am surprised that I haven't found anything. I'll keep looking, and then might try to hack something together. Unfortunately, I think this is primarily a graphic data representation problem, an area where I have essentially zero skill at cobbling code together for.
OK. Now to think about it some more, and finish up with the lasagna prep…
mslima, bubble.us is very cool, but I was needing a tool that automatically builds relationship maps of a constrained set of websites, by crawling the pages or feeds and following/counting links, etc…
bubble.us is a cool diagram creation tool, but it’s a manual process so I’d have to build it manually each time I update the diagram. If I was to do it manually, I’d just use OmniGraffle Professional…
Never mind that, when will the ceviche be ready?
scott – no worries. I appear to have a track record of having ideas, starting to think about implementation, then getting distracted by other things (or realizing I have no freaking clue how to actually BUILD the thing, yet…)
roland – unfortunately, I’m not sure just how far I can go with it. I don’t have the Mad Skillz necessary to properly implement this one…
alan – soon. had to settle for mussels and panko calimari last night.
Jeff, thanks for the link. Some of those visualizations look great, but I was hoping to build something that generates a dynamic tree/link map on the fly for a given set of websites.
Hey, I don’t care if you don’t code this as long as the cerviche is ready! Priorities, priorities!
Setting the bar pretty high I see, Mr. Norman. Are you not maybe a little concerned about starting a precedent? (oh, that was mean!)
Anyhoo, while it doesn’t do what you are talking about, this new screensaver that visualizes the entire blogosphere on top of the globe is pretty cool, and might be a suitable backdrop. I’ll see if I can’t get it running on my laptop for tomorrow.
go d’arcy go!
You might find the following to be a good source of inspiration: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/
As easy as it gets:
http://www.bubbl.us/edit.php