Visual Relationships

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.

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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).

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