Mapping your blog mind revisited
A while ago I posted some thoughts about creating a mindmap of your blog. I’ve spent the last couple of evenings fiddling around with tags, a little easy php and Ucinet, some SNA software. I thought I’d post the rough and ready pics now, and do some more explaining when I’ve more time tomorrow.
A 3d visualisation of my blog tags
A 2d visualisation of my blog tags
Highlighting one tag (information overload)
[UPDATE]
If you want to have a play around with this sort of stuff, here’s what I did.
- First, I tagged most of my MT entries by adding keywords to them. It took a while, but was made much quicker by tinkering with MT so that it autosuggested tags based on what I’d already put in. [Have a look at Eat, Drink, Sleep Movable Type if you want the code. Also worth a mention is Mike Everett-Lane’s guide to making subject indexes with MT]
- That done, I wrote and uploaded some homemade and not very graceful code to my server. You can get it here if you want it - it’s 2K, and you’ll need to add some config options so you can access MT. These are basically a) how many times a tag has to be mentioned to be counted, and b) some database passwords and names. There’s more information in the comments
- Running the code gave me a comma separated list that I could use with Ucinet. I uploaded the php file to my blog root directory, ran it, and then opened the file it made at http://my_blog_root/tag_sna.csv
- And from there it was off and running into Ucinet. Or at least Ucinet was running and I was stumbling
Anyway. A few things struck me about all this.
- Just as organisational network analysis provides an x-ray communication patterns that can’t be seen from an organigram, so this sort of tag analysis might help to unearth what people are really saying. Prejudices, or at least biases, will out.
- The idea of there being structural holes in the tag network was, I thought, intriguing. If people who live in the intersection of social worlds are at higher risk of having good ideas, perhaps new, original thoughts might be more easily found at the intersection of tag networks like the one above? Don’t know.
- What if you could subscribe not to somebody’s whole blog feed, or one of their classification’s feeds, but tags within, say, two degrees of a tag? It’s that optimal unfamiliarity idea again, and it’s got some interesting possibilites with regards to strategic feeds.
- Lastly, and this is with a hat tip to gents like Denham Grey, what about linking two such tag networks? As Denham recently said, with
“no trust, no connections, no relationships, there will be no knowledge, learning, new meaning, innovation opportunity and most likely no business.
This is not chicken and egg stuff, it is fundamental to working with knowledge”
Tag maps may help me navel-gaze. And they might help me show you a fuller picture of myself (and so help that trust bit). But more directly, if you had a map, and I had a map are there any indicators we could generate to show how similar our tagging was, how closely aligned our mindsets were? Dunno. Probably, but I think that’s in the “too hard for a Saturday morning” camp.
This is great!
Piers this is something I’ve been thinking about over the last couple of months. The ‘journal’ format of most (all?) blogs doesn’t work well for me. A mind-map type visualistaion is what I’d like to play with.
Yup. Mindmaps do have that visual advantage
You might want to have a look at Ruben Puentedura’s stuff on making mindmaps from delicious. And there’s also Blaine Kendall’s del.icio.us mind. I suspect you could do the same with blog tags.
Hi Piers,
this looks great, especially the connection to MT which brings it within reach of simple application.
Have been wondering about tagging and my blog. Am currently mulling over possibilities to let other people Technorati-tag my postings in my blog. (as they now do through delicious sometimes)
As to using keywords in MT for tagging. That is of course viable (I use it to create Technorati links to tags), but I use Qumana as an editor which generates the tags directly in my posting’s body. Hmm.
Also two names come to mind here to help explore this further: Anjo Anjewierden (colleague of Lilia) and Valdis Krebs (for visualization and connecting tag clouds).
Hi Ton
Thanks for that! Thought of Anjo and the work he’s done with Lilia and Stephanie, and yes, if guru’s like Valdis can work their magic so much the better
You’re right that the keywords approach is one of many, and pretty specific. I suppose people could automatically generate some keywords with something like Richard LeCour’s keywords plugin, but then there are real problems with automating these things in that the judges of success (us humans) know much more than the tools trying to succeed.
More fundamentally, though, I think there are real differences between how an individual tags their post, how people in that individual’s group (profession, family, club, nationality) tag the post, and how the rest of the world tag it. The above test is very much from the individual perspective, and a problem I have with delicious/technorati is that they’re all “rest of the world” level approaches (and have scale problems as a result). Group tags are trickier. Hmm.
That is why I think tags should always be traceable back to the tagger.
I use tags e.g. to find other groups in delicious that appear to be interested in the same stuff as I am but use different words, or use the same words for a different set of information.
The triangle info-tag-tagger is important to me. It helps me make distinctions between individuals, groups, and the rest of the world. With any two I can start exploring the third.
Looks great! I’ve been meaning to do something like this using Touchgraph ( http://www.touchgraph.com/ ) but could never figure out how to make a complete keyword index using MT.
BTW, I’m getting a mysql error when trying to get your code…
Thanks Mike - any more details on the error?
I get:
Warning: mysql_connect(): Access denied for user: ‘monkeym@localhost’ (Using password: NO) in /home/monkeym/public_html/blog/tagsna.php on line 15
Error connecting to mysql
Thanks Mike. I’d been daft. File should now work (it’s a zip file that needs extracting and editing where indicated).