TouchGraph: visualizing your Web site's social network

[Click on the graph for a larger version]

I think of visualization like broadband thinking; visualization just communicates more ideas faster. After all, our eyes are the highest bandwidth path between the world and our brains. Visualization tools move relationships over that high bandwidth path instead of waiting for our brains to figure out the relationships from reading or thinking. The more ways we can turn words into pictures, the more easily we and others can understand the ideas behind them.

Smashing Magazine's article on data visualization is one of the most thought-provoking I've seen recently. One of the links noted in the article (I forget which one) turned me onto Touchgraph.com, a wonderful online Java tool that graphs the social network (i.e., links to your site) of your Web site via Google, or the social network of your Facebook page via Facebook. The results of graphing Blackfriarsinc.com is above and pointed me at a bunch of links I hadn't seen before. Touchgraph is definitely worth a look to get a visual grasp of Web relationships; said another way, it tells you who your Web friends are.

Another site in the article is now on my list of first sites to visit every day: Newsmap (NOT newsmap.com) provides a visual guide to the Google News stories of the day, much in the way that SmartMoney.com's Map Of The Market gives you a real-time grasp of the US stock markets and mutual funds.

The entire Smashing Magazine article is worth reading, if for no other reason than that it will give you new ideas on how to visualize data. For me, it was probably the best article I read over the Labor Day weekend. Give it a look.

Technorati Tags: Graphics, Newsmap, Smashing Magazine, Touchgraph.com, Touchgraph.com, Virtualization