The first up is a basic but clever little Java applet that displays the structure of any given website. You pop in the URL of your choice and the applet gets busy making a conceptual diagram of your site.
Links (blue), tables (red), images (violet), forms (yellow) and HTML tags (amongst others) are allocated a particular colour and placed accordingly in a spider chart. That is then laid out on the basis of how the various elements of the site relate to each other and on their frequency.
Although simple it's interesting to compare the structure one site to the next. Have a look how the IWR blog compares to the IWR home page.
IWR Blog
IWR Website
The outcome is a unique and pretty graphic, but the question is how useful is it?
In its current form maybe not so much for the average information pro, but what if rather than search through the amount of DIV tags and HTML links on a site, it could search a number of key words and how they relate? Fortunately the source code has been made available so if anyone is interested have a look.
As a start it illustrates how people are being inspired to show the things they find fascinating in unique and innovative ways.
Next up is Breathing Earth a 'real-time' map of the world that shows very clearly the co2 emissions of any given country while a series of either sun or shadow icons flash up whenever someone is either born or died in the world.
The simulation takes its data from sources ranging from the United Nations to the World Factbook (published by the CIA) and works out the averages. Apart from the world map itself, a table in the corner of the page shows the amount of co2 generated and how many births and deaths their have been since you opened up the page.
It's a clever way of hammering home the momentum of civilisation from the energy it takes to maintain the lifestyles of richer nations to poignant flickering of a multitude of sun and shadow icons in the developing regions on the planet. By making the point so well it rather impressed me.
Finally, I also came across a rather handy vendor generated tool while conducting a review of their recently revamped website.
Credo Reference (or Xrefer as you may remember them) has recently relaunched their web services platform, and tucked away in there is a reworked Concept Map. This self animated spider diagram is another excellent way of showing the researcher what the relationships are to different but related search results. Results can be manipulated so easily, even the ability to display the depth of your results is available. You can probably tell that I rather liked it. But more of that in the review to come.
In the meantime any of the more technical minded of you out there think you could apply these to your work, do let us know what results you had.
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