It looks like CNET has a new feature called big picture which basically allows you to view their site as a graph. Their rendering control is actually LivePlasma which is pretty nice.
How it works For every story published, News.com editors and reporters included relevant links to other News.com stories. In addition, News.com highlights the important companies that appear in a story as well as attach appropriate topics to each story.
It’s awesome that CNET is trying out new ideas to see what sticks. I’ve blogged about this before in the past (though I don’t have a link since my old site is offline). If you’re interested in graph visualization I’d recommend checking out Prefuse. While at Rojo I actually did an experiment using our link graph to render web structure using Prefuse.
prefuse is a user interface toolkit for building highly interactive visualizations of structured and unstructured data. This includes any form of data that can be represented as a set of entities (or nodes) possibly connected by any number of relations (or edges). Examples of data supported by prefuse include hierarchies (organization charts, taxonomies, file systems), networks (computer networks, social networks, web site linkage) and even non-connected collections of data (timelines, scatterplots).
Of course it was just an experiment and only ran on my laptop so never saw the light of day.
The problem though is that users don’t like graph visualization. Even researchers have problems understanding graph visualizations. They’re just a toy. While I commend CNET for shipping a cool new innovative tool I just don’t see people using this on a day-to-day basis.
I’d love to be proven wrong though.
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October 2, 2005 at 5:54 pm
Kevin,
You are right about the problem with users and graphs. Graphs are good to show aggregate patterns (if there are any – usually there aren’t in most of the applications that this type of viz is put to).
For some reason, marketing/sales people will bend over backwards to have something in the product appear somewhere as a graph – they don’t grasp the fundamental differences between eye candy and useful data visualizations.
For the type of thing that CNet is doing – users can grok a central or focus node and probably the set of nodes 1 link away – the rest just becomes noise. What is needed is a way to make the other stuff fade into the background a little so you know it is there, but it is not using up cognitive resources. Hey – maybe I’ll implement that…
October 2, 2005 at 9:52 pm
Matthew.
Microsoft had a product a few years ago that showed distance via nodes that were obscured by fog. The nodes were in the background and you could tell they were farther away because you couldn’t quite make them out.
Anyway.. I thought it was a brilliant idea. The problme is that you’d need to do it via DirectX or OpenGL if you wanted to do it right.
October 2, 2005 at 10:39 pm
We’re interested to learn more about what CNET News.com readers think, too.
Cheers,
John Roberts
CNET News.com product development