Re: [ba-ohs-talk] TouchGraph used on backlink DB
On Sat, 15 Dec 2001, Peter Jones wrote: (01)
> Yes, good idea. I was heading there next. ;-) (02)
With help from Peter and Alex, I managed to get Peter's visualization
using Alex's TouchGraph up and running. The results are at: (03)
http://www.eekim.com/ohs/backlinks/GraphLayout.html (04)
I used the hack that Alex suggested to shrink the names of the originating
URLs, and I added my own hack so that the applet loaded backlinks.txt from
the web: (05)
URL url = new URL("http://www.eekim.com/ohs/backlinks/backlinks.txt";);
BufferedReader bdbReader = new
BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(url.openStream())); (06)
I also filtered backlinks.txt by: (07)
1. Removing links to http://www.eekim.com/ -- those are all from my
.sig. (08)
2. Only including links from ba-unrev-talk. (09)
3. Removing the link type info -- I added that data after Peter had
already wrote his code. That data could be incorporated later by
changing the color of the links based on type. (010)
After seeing this visualization for myself, I see what Alex meant with
this comment: (011)
> > I wonder how useful the results of such a visualization would be,
> > though. The advantage that Wiki's like Langreaiter.com has over email
> > lists, is that any time a concept is mentioned it automatically gets a
> > hyperlink. The backlink DB however, only contains explicit
> > hyperlinks. So, in the case where one replies to an annoucement of a link
> > without including the link itself ( for instance, this email lack(ed) a
> > link to the backlink database http://www.bootstrap.org/lists/backlinks.txt
> > ) A connection would not be made between the reply and the original post. (012)
I suppose this could be improved by attempting to associate links with
concept names automatically, although it's not something I intend to try.
I do think that this, as well as Alex's other post on Wiki visualization: (013)
http://www.bootstrap.org/lists/ba-ohs-talk/0112/msg00085.html (014)
demonstrates how close Wikis are to being a candidate OHS. Add typed
links and even finer-grained addressability, and you've got a very
interesting system. (As a side note, I agree with Jack's assessment that
Lucid Fried Eggs is a step in this direction.) (015)
My original vision for this backlink data -- which I have yet to implement
-- was to have three HTML frames: a side pane, a bottom frame, and a main
frame. The side pane lists all of the to-links; the bottom the
back-links; and the main the actual web page. In other words, every time
you viewed a web page that was linked from an e-mail, the back-links would
be visible from the bottom pane. When I get some time, I'll do it, but I
hope others will follow Peter's initiative, and beat me to the punch! (016)
> Was fun to play with the TG GraphLayout library though. (017)
It was fun to see what you did with it! (018)
-Eugene (019)
--
+=== Eugene Eric Kim ===== eekim@eekim.com ===== http://www.eekim.com/ ===+
| "Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they |
+===== can have an excuse to drink alcohol." --Steve Martin ===========+ (020)