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May 10, 2007
Analisys and experiments on relations into the Italian Blogosphere
From some days Ive been invited to join to the blogbabel initiative that aims to maps the italian blogosphere.
My effort in this interesting project is about to find some new, usefull infovis related solutions to offer some better cognitive tools to approach to the italian blog world and relations.
I started looking around to find interesting solutions about blog-mapping ( from the Manuel Limas blogviz , to the BlogoPole French initiative - thanks to Carla for the link - and the first BlogBabel visualization from Ludo ).
What it seemed to me really interesting is mainly the relations Analisys and not the Graph representation, because it tends to offer a "star-system style visual environment that requires some more deep work in oprder to be used to understand how blogs are related each other.
My idea is really simple:
suppose to have a line where I can use points as Blog.
Above the line I can have arches connecting a source blog ( on the left side of the arch ) to another ( on the right side of the arch ).
Below the line I can have also arches, but the connection direction is from right to left.
The use of arches and circles come out from "The shape of Songs by Martin Wattenberg.
In this way we have a LinksOut View( UP ) and a LinksIn View ( DOWN ) and we could use the opacity of each arch to visualize how relations are relevant considering the numeber of links ( in/out ) among blogs.
Some image from the ActionScript based prototype
I tested some first XML data and it seems that a better view is available when BLOGs are ordered by a LinkBlogSourceID criteria.
http://www.mentegrafica.it/blog/2007/05/10/analisys-and-experiments-on-relation-into-the-italian-blogosphere/
Posted by InfoVis at May 10, 2007 6:48 AM
