I’ve been thinking a bit more about the functionality I want in my personal learning environment, or at least my feedreader. In addition to Subscription by Topic, I want to be able to click on a ‘button’ and have a pop-up show me a visual network diagram (with active links) of the particular blog conversation. Last month, Mark Oehlert did this for the 5 things meme (I presume manually) that likely subconsciously triggered this idea for me today.
As a proof of concept, again manually, I started out to map the conversation begun with Tom Haskin’s Beware of Blogging post. This lead me down a path of exploring network analysis software, which is something that I’ve been wanting to add to my toolkit for a long time. Some resources for that journey here and here. Alas what I am reaching for in the immediate is just is a Linux version of Netdraw — and I admit defeat, for now, on a quick path to there.
This got me to thinking “surely someone has already done this” and search came up with MemeMapper whose Papers page is now on my list of content to further dig into.
The visual that I have in my head is the author of the blog currently selected as the center large circular node and then (say) blue network lines to the people (blogs) linked to from that initiating post, red network lines for inbound links or comments, purple for where there are both inbound and outbound between nodes (people). The line width would denote the total number of links and comments, an indicator of the depth of conversation between these two people. The size of the circle would scale by total posts or comments by that particular person (to/from all others) and within the circle would be links to the individual posts.
What I have in mind is only mapping from a particular post (for example the one of Tom’s mentioned above) forward in time and not trying to map an entire subject.
Any other pointers to someone that already as solved this one?
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