...or tracing the SNA DNA of weblogging posts…

Back on March 25, 2004, Lilia Efimova made mention that she was pondering the visualization of weblog conversations. And then, in an IM chat session, Lilia and I recently conversed in more depth on this topic. I began researching and found a number of neat visualization tools, but none specifically designed to map and follow weblogging conversations over time and space.

Later on that same day I asked Betsy Devine—of Funny Ha-Ha and Feedster fame—if she knew of anyone who was either working on or had produced a weblog conversation visualization tool. Betsy just emailed me a reference to Mary Hodder's Paparazzi project proposal at UC Berkeley's SIMS (School of Information Management and Systems).

Coincidentally, yesterday, Mary Hodder wrote of being comment spammed on her MT napsterization weblog (her comment spam was in the thousands and mine in the hundreds on my knowledge notes weblog over these last few days). How do we go about visualizing these weblogging conversations sans the insane and inane static of senseless comment spam? But, I do digress.

From Mary Hodder regarding the design goals of her Paparazzi project:

One of our major design goals is to provide blog readers with a tool that will allow them to follow a conversation that takes place over the course of days or weeks on many different sites. Current blog readers can follow these conversations because they are active participants in the conversations and can follow the conversation as it occurs. However, once a blog entry is no longer the current topic of debate, the conversation becomes lost in the archives. We would like our tool to effectively display the relationships between entries and topics amongst bloggers to anyone who desires this information.

One method that we have discussed would involve a site that aggregates blog data and allows searching by keyword. The results would be displayed in a keyword-in-context format; however, we want to avoid a list of discrete entry, instead showing a thread-like display of the entire conversation. We are interested in a design that combines a search interface with a visual representation of blog conversations. We believe that a text-only representation of search results and blog linkages will hide the complexities of these conversations as well as conceal valuable data. Additionally, there will be opportunities for other features, such as dynamic filters, zooming, and so forth, pending early testing and prototypes.

Who else is working on the visualization of weblogging conversations?