Jon Schull asks of Casey Marshall's Picture of Weblogs : " Is this enlightening or bedazzling?" Well, exactly. These kinds of connectedness graphs are briefly fun and interesting, but a graphical toolkit wants to do so much more. It wants to use shape, size, color, intensity, text, hypertext, and many other devices to map out dimensions beyond just who is connected to whom.
The most challenging dimension of analysis is time. To record data over time takes the diligence and patience of a stop-motion photographer. What would the resulting movie show? Waves of influence propagating through blogspace, perhaps. Some nodes growing in size and exerting more gravitational attraction, others fading, still others oscillating.
(PS: Jon, your image doesn't appear because it's locally referenced ( http://localhost:5335...). Don't worry. Happens to every new Radio user. I keep meaning to write an onPost filter that catches these errors.)
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/05/07.html#a221