Max Kiesler - Designer
Ecosystem Navigation and Tiny Visualizations
SubscribeWednesday, February 21, 2007
It's not AJAX, DHTML, Java, or Ruby but it is a new way of seeing blog categories. Tonight I'm presenting the first in a series of tiny blog visualizations. If you look in the top right corner of my new home page you'll see a clickable pie chart of my current blog categories presented by popularity. Why tiny visualizations? In the last year I've been impressed by the number and quality of large scale data visualizations. Sites like Digg Labs, We Feel Fine and Gapminder all present a new flow and discovery model for data. However, in these examples the visualization is based on a very large data set. Recently, I've become increasingly interested in the idea of tiny visualizations and how this notion can be used as a way to navigate blogs and other micro communities.
Many community websites have adopted a new form of navigation which works more like an ecosystem and less like a static list. The definition of an ecosystem is "a system formed by the interaction of a community of organisms with their environment". Ecosystem navigation relies on community input including, recency, popularity, and activity. As an avid reader blogs I've always been struck by the similarity in the way their information is presented and navigated. In a standard blog paradigm the reader is presented with a list of blog posts sorted by date, and a list of comments, categories, tags. By scanning this list of information the reader is given a good idea of what the blog is focused on and what topics the author posts about. However, this is less of a ecosystem approach and more of a linear presentation of the authors content. Tags and categories do give blog readers a non-liner way to explore a website and and this was the first area I decided to focus on.
The first tiny visualization that I saw on blogs that addressed the linear nature of the date driven layout was the tag cloud. This construct shows a list of tags used by the author in a weighted list which shows the most popular tags used as larger text and the lesser used tags as smaller text. This meta layer lets the website reader see graphically and quickly the most popular tags used by the author or the community. While tag clouds shows the authors interest, it does not show the readers interests.
Most blog authors have a statistical program that shows them readers interest by tracking incoming and outgoing links to their website. This data shows what the popularity is of an article or category of at any given time. Many of the newer stats programs are also enhanced with real-time charts and graphs which give you an easy way to comprehend all of the data. Whether this information is presented by month, day or even in real-time it shows the author what their readers are interested in. I have found over the years that this data does not always correlate with my blogs date driven navigational hierarchy . Many times my most popular posts on a given day is not the most resent. So I started wondering about the idea of showing blog data by popularity by both myself and my readers.
So was born my category pie chart. I know what you're thinking, "why an imaged mapped graphic -are we living in 1997"? In a work no, this graphic was produced serverside on the fly by real time database information and the image map that controls it is completely accessible. It was built with a software app named ChartDirector which I combined it with my blog application. What's missing at this point is the popularity of category by readers. Once I've created this chart, myself, and my readers can see what categories we are both interested in. This is more of an eco-friendly navigational system. Next steps will also include developing other tiny visualizations of blog posts, comments and archives.
Ecosystem navigation is a convergence of both the authors and readers interest presented by recency, popularity, activity. The next step for me will be to find a real-time convergence in categories, tags and blog posts presented in an easy to understand graphical manner. Consider this a starting point for the discussion. Please let me know what you think about these ideas in the comment section of this post.
Comments on this post
paramvir on 02/22 at 05:12 AM
max you are the jking! love the tiny visualisations. i have often wondered about such navigational items myself, but not being a programmer i cant get far. great work! love it!
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Max Kiesler is an award-winning strategic designer and co-founder
and principal of Ideacodes.com, a web consultancy in San Francisco
focused on next generation websites. About Max...
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License