By complete coincidence, I came across two new visualisation tools in my morning reading today.
The first is TouchGraph, a Java application that creates a graph showing the relationships between any web address and the rest of the Web. It does this by grabbing the list of related sites from Google – the same list you’d get by typing in ‘related: www.address.com’. But then it creates a bubble map showing the strength and importance of those links. It doesn’t work especially well for this blog, I’m afraid to say, since there are a lot of internal links which don’t make for very interesting viewing. However, type in the name of a large public site and the results can be fascinating.
The other one is Socialistics, a Facebook app that analyses your friends. It can slice them up in lots of different ways. Very sinister – but really that kind of voyeurism is one of the site’s real joys. One of the most interesting is the tag cloud that supposedly shows how close you are to your friends. I find it fascinating, though I’m a tad sceptical of the results, since I’m supposedly closer to Hugh MacLeod than I am to my wife (sorry, Hugh, I was meaning to tell you).
Share this post:
I tried Touchgraph… looks good but likewise doesn’t like my blog much at all.
Ian — Awesome!
Touchgraph looks as though you could play with it all day. Will try it out over the weekend. Socialistics falls into the same category.
I hope Hugh recovers.
Take care.
[…] années et j’ai laissé passer les mises à jour (jusqu’à ce que je tombe sur ce billet de twopointouch […]