It would be great to have Rhizome Navigation running with Flash. I guess it could be a lot faster than the current Java implementation. So what I'm looking for is a graph visualization framework like prefuse for Flash.
Some starting points: Newton's gravitation law in Flash
Update: I wrote this more than a year ago. In the meantime I came to the conclusion (after discovering processing) that I'll stick to Java (+OpenGL). Nonetheless some interesting things were done with Flash and more will come for sure.
Good news: Rhizome Navigation is now running live in your browser (click the image above). At first it loads and visualises last week's user behaviour of Metaportal der Medienpolemik and then continues with current traffic (Don't think it freezes after a while, this just means that traffic isn't actually very high on MdM. If you continue browsing the site you'll see that the graph will adapt to your behaviour.) The application is non-interactive for now. Navigation and usability is the next step. This is just a tech demo drawing a graph.
Requirements
I did not do a lot of platform testing. Here it runs on Mac OSX in both Safari and Firefox. You'll need Java installed. Beware, it's still an early release, your browser might crash. If you have any problems loading the applet or want to leave me a comment, please let me know.
Thanks
This would not have been possible without the wonderful proce55ing.
For more example work head over to the Rhizome Navigation homepage.
p2pfoundation has an interesting post about the importance of time as a dimension in social networking technology. My concept of Rhizome Navigation includes some of these thoughts. Simply spoken Rhizome Navigation transforms measurements of (unix) time(stamps) and visualizes them as a graph. That means it substitutes the room dimension with the time dimension. That's possible and even useful, because there is no relation to physical space in virtual rooms. That means the representation of space in virtual reality is an empty variable which we can use and fill with some kind of metaphor. A useful metaphor. However, some simply don't get it.
Had no time to take a closer look yet, but this looks hot: Mark Shepherd's Flex Component for Graph Visualization.
Graphical visualizations of political parties' campaign programs for Austria's election for the National Council 2006 (in German).
Screenshots and Screencast Video.
Using material from 1990's Gulf War, 2002's starting invasion into Iraque and 2006' crisis in Lebanon.
Visualization Application Framework for building Navigation Interfaces based on Attention Data and User Behavior Analysis.
Examples and tutorials based on Ron Brinkmann's The Art And Science Of Digital Compositing.
The graph above is an analysis of how blogs from my blogroll are interconnected. I did it by fetching today's RSS-feeds from the blogs, then parsed each individual blog posting and looked for links to other blogs from the blogroll.
I was a bit surprised how many connections there are given the fact that I just fetched the current state of each RSS-feed. Maybe that's because I was just looking for Domain-Names, so youtube.com for example appears as one blog, regardless to which user/video one links.
Next I'll do an analysis on blog-posting/URI-level. That way this could turn out to be a more accurate conversation tracker.
I removed the Lijit Widget from the page. The idea is great, but search was simply too slow. I replaced it with PhpWiki's builtin FullTextSearch at the top right.
However, if you want to try out Lijit on myob you may still do so below (permalink). And I encourage you to try out the widget's explore button for some highly addictive social network browsing (didn't work in Firefox for me, try Safari - dunno about IE).
Wolfgang Prinz on choosing a Rendering API for GVS
"If rendering performance were a western movie, JOGL would be “the good”, Java3D would be “the bad” and Java2D would be “the ugly”."
http://www.iicm.tugraz.at/x-coll22100/wprinz.pdf
A year ago I wished we had Decentralized Social Networking based on openID. Back in August '07 we saw the rise of NoseRub starting as a PHP library trying to achieve this purpose. In the last months NoseRub's founder Dirk Olbertz enlarged the team and improved the library. They even started a reference platform based on NoseRub: Identoo.com. And it looks promising indeed!
Identoo allows you to create a profile and add web(2.0) services you use (del.icio.us etc.). This alone wouldn't be so extraordinary, basically it's a lifestream many services offer. But what I haven't seen doing another project is recognizing most of your contacts from these services and let them add as contacts to your Identoo account.
But let's not forget, Identoo is (at the moment) a reference platform, or let's say your identity provider. Identoo/NoseRub could be for social networking what WordPress is for blogs: a service provider (wordpress.com) and an open-source software (wordpress.org) for the same purpose.
And, as with WordPress, this could of course work: Those who're just looking for the functionality and are not interested in the technical details choose Identoo, others who have their own webspace and want to be in control (meaning both the technology and their properties) take NoseRub.
So, for those interested: See you at http://identoo.com/walterra/
Did some experiments with Google's Social Graph API and Twitter. Images were done with Rhizome Navigation. The graph shows mutual relationships between 200 people (with my account in the center). The background is darker in areas where people are more connected.
Twitter Rasterfahndung ©
