North by northwest
Matthew Hurst continues to do fascinating work analyzing and visualizing the blogosphere. That thing above shows links three degrees of separation from this blog. I disagree with Hurst’s conclusion about it; I simply write about blogs in the blogosphere and that garners navel-gazing links.
See his neat work on the World Cup here and here and here. This is a geographic view of world cup discussion.
See this on mainstream media.
And see this visualization. You can mouse over it and see which blogs are at the center of nodes. The mess in the middle is political. At north-northwest, see Engadget and the gadget blogs. At northwest, that big thing is Boing Boing. At due west, find some food blogs. It’s valuable that the relationships among blogs begin to surface topicality. Maybe Matthew should come up with a standard world map so we can stop talking about ourselves as left or right, red or blue; we can live on blog continents (and be bicoastal there).
And the great thing about this post is that, being about blogs, it will get blog posts. But that’s not why I posted it. Honest, it’s not.
Tags: Weblogs
July 8th, 2006 at 2:35 pm
Early in my professional career I, and some colleagues, did work on connections between scientific documents. We called it clustering at the time. Citations were a very good predictor of relevance, as were certain patterns of key words. The computer power and storage capacity weren’t enough in those days to do more than organize specialized scientific subspecialties.
Now that the horsepower is available it is sad to see that the algorithms used for analysis are rather unsophisticated. One of the reasons sites like Google work is because most people are satisfied with a close match to what they are looking for, rather than requiring high relevance. This weakness extends to our spy agencies as well, as their need to use wholesale harvesting of electronic data illustrates. If they really had algorithms for discovering patterns of illegal activity they would be doing targeted data capture.