Watching 'wtf Wikipedia' as SOPA/PIPA blackout begins
Jan 17, 2012 10:03 pm • Permalink 
While SOPA and PIPA are no laughing matter (join the strike), the reaction from those on Twitter who don't know what's going on is great entertainment. Do a search on 'wtf wikipedia' for tweets from confused individuals who are trying to find information on stuff. I'm just going to leave Twitter trackers Revisit and Spot, by Moritz Stefaner and Jeff Clark, respectively, open all day. "OMG I'm doing homework and Wikipedia is blacked out wtf !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
Amazon recommendation network
Jan 17, 2012 01:21 pm • Permalink 
Whenever you look at an item on Amazon, the site recommends related items that you might be interested in. So in a way, these items are connected by how people buy. Artist and designer Christopher Warnow uses the metaphor to create a network of Amazon products, where each node represents an item, and connections, or edges, represent common bonds of recommendations. Simply enter an Amazon link, and Warnow's software generates a network.
For example, the image above is the network for Edward Tufte's Visual Display of Quantitative Information, although Stephen Few's Information Dashboard Design seems to have more connections for some reason. My quick guess is that book's that are less niche have more connections, because when I entered Visualize This, the network was pretty small. Although I would've thought that Tufte's book would have a larger network than Few's.
In any case, the application and Processing code is free to play with. Warnow uses Gephi for network connections and grouping. Or if you don't feel like downloading a 60mb file, you can just watch it in action in the video below.
You might also be interested in Yasiv. It's a web app with a similar idea, but not quite as slick of an implementation.
[Christopher Warnow via Datavisualization]
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