Visual Settlements in Weblogs

One the things I'm struggling with is compressing weblog data, in particular links between posts. The ideal solution would be a graphical overview that is crisp and small enough to fit on the screen. An idea that I have seen in many posts is to compare weblogs to a city and I was wondering whether this metaphor could also be used for the visualisation and user interface of weblog link data. The context is research on a community of weblogs and the researcher is interested in obtaining information about who links to who within this community. For small communities (say 50 blogs) it should not be necessary to just depict the weblog as a single blob without further detail.

I would be interested in what you think of the following idea, and of course pointers to others who have tried to address the same problem are also much appreciated. The idea is as follows. We consider each weblog to be a visual settlement. A visual settlement consists of houses, offices, parks and lakes, just like most cities. The layout of a visual settlement is then determined as follows:

• Houses (red). A bit of red is added for each post for which there is no link back inside the community. These posts reflect that the blogger is neither referring to others in the community and also no one in the community is referring to the blogger. In other words, the blogger is at home discussing matters that are of no interest to the community.
• Offices (grey). A bit of grey is added for each post in which the blogger links to at least one other post inside the community. In this case, the blogger is at work: she studies the ideas of others and links back.
• Parks (green). A bit of green is added for each post in which at least one of the other bloggers in the community links back to. In this case, the blogger is sitting in the park with her portable reading the response(s) by others.
• Lakes (blue). A bit of blue is added for each post that contains a link to another blogger and where the other blogger also links back. The water in the lake symbolises there is a flow between the bloggers.

Comments

[Auke Touwslager]

First thought that popped into my mind:
Mapping A Virtual City http://mappa.mundi.net/maps/maps_013/

[Michal Migurski]

How about using grey for the first item, posts with no inbound or outbound links? Your description reminds me of SimCity, which did an excellent job of visually identifying slummy or abandoned neighborhoods by coloring them in grey drab colors.

The layout of the town is important too - cities often grow in a radial fashion. If your site is categorized by topic, each distinct topic might be a development push in some direction away from the city center. As posts are commented, pinged, tracked back, or responded to, their representative buildings develop into dense towers. The categories that are growing the fastest will be easy apparent, spatially.

[Anjo]

Michal, Several nice and useful ideas, thanks. This particular visualisation is only intended to show weblog linkage in a particular community. So, for example a "red" weblog is not necessarily abandoned, but this is to interpreted as: within the community there are very few links (in or out).

Your idea of a radial spatial layout certainly makes implementation easier!