Here we go, a first implementation of Visual Settlements. The examples below summarise 2004 blogging of myself, Lilia, Alex Halavais and Robert Scobler (click to enlarge the images below, Scobler's is only shown partly -- more than 6000 posts in one year). Roughly the method to draw the pictures is as follows:
- Size of a blob is determined by the number of words in the post. Bigger blob, more words (in fact: every pixel represents one word).
- Colour of the blob is determined by whether there are links to others (grey), links from others (green) or no links (red). All with respect to a community of KM bloggers determined by Lilia and Stephanie
- Position of the blog is determined by the chronological order (oldest posts are in the center) and by self-linking (if a post self links back to an own post, it will appear close to the original post).
Obviously, such maps could be based on a wide variety of (other) features weblogs have. This particular one illustrates the linkage structure within a certain community of bloggers. I think the detail is pretty compelling and better illustrates community linkage than simple linkage statistics as numbers. Many thanks to Michal Migurski for his comments on the original post.
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Did you decide to leave out the lakes (blue), or were there none?
Useful representation. Would be cool to have a tool we could point to a blog and a community definition and see the results!
Posted by: Dave Shearon | January 15, 2005 at 01:50 PM
My original definition of the blue posts was wrong (you cannot have a two-way link in posts). The notion remains valid, but I'll have to think on how to operationalise it.
Posted by: Anjo | January 15, 2005 at 03:12 PM
Of course. Thanks!
Posted by: Dave Shearon | January 16, 2005 at 01:24 PM