Connections — representing how people think about blogs, people and information

I was browsing through Technorati this morning, looking at the connections between my blog, my readers, and their readers, when I came across a blog post by Suzie Cheel on this very topic — connections between blogs. In her post, Suzie presents a map of the relationships between websites. I figured I definitely needed to have a go myself.

(That’s my blog’s website in the center)

What interested me was the way that the tool that produced the map, TouchGraph, represents the connections between topics. It’s very similar to what people produce as:

• a mind map of information of business topics
• the output from IT systems network analysis
• the output from a human social network analysis
• a representation of a neural net of a person’s memories

Of course, given my psych background, and love for topic maps as a representation of the way people think about information, TouchGraph represents an amazing way of presenting and reinforcing the fact that people don’t think in terms of hierarchies of information — they think in blobs and clusters and they think in terms of the relationships between things, not primarily their categories.

Download it and have a play! — TouchGraph requires the Java Runtime Environment 5

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