Saturday, 9 November 2002
optical illusions
Blogdex says everyone else already knows about Akiyoshi's optical illusion pages.
I'm linking anyways, because these are very cool.
more ecosystem tools
Stumbled upon Waypath today, which goes beyond the link analyzing that most of the other blogging ecosystem tools offer.
The Waypath Project's Related Weblog Navigation engine analyzes weblog entries to determine their core conceptual makeups, compares them with one another to find out how related they are, and presents you with its best guess as to what's related to your original input. This is done all automatically, using available technology.
Very cool. Plugged in my blog address, and got back an interesting list that included some sites I'd not encountered before, and liked very much.
blog genealogy
Another interesting one, though it's more dependent on user input.
Blogtree tracks the process by which blog authors inspire and encourage new blogs. When I registered, I was able to specify which blogs I considered to be my "parent" blogs--those which inspired me to create my own blog. (Different from those that I read regularly, though there's obviously some overlap.)
Based on that input, it generates a family tree for me, which includes a list of "siblings"--other blogs with similar genealogy. If my blog inspires a friend or reader to create his or her own, it would then become one of my "child" blogs. Hmmm. Not as awe-inspiring to me as things like allconsuming or waypath, but fun and informative nonetheless.
blog appeal
Apparently the guys who run the "hot or not" photo rating service (can't bear to link to it...) now run one for blogs. That I can live with. So, is my blog hot? or not? Inquiring minds want to know. :-)
circle game
I'm increasingly convinced that the natural affinity principle I mused about earlier this week will be a major force in helping people manage the infoglut associated with the expanding "blogosphere."
Today's example. Jill Walker linked to an interesting blog called texturl. Read through a few entries, and found that the author, Brandon Barr, (a) lives here in Rochester, and (b) attended a symposium on 'language and encoding' today in Buffalo that my mother also attended (and that I wanted to attend). [added later: can't trackback without a link to a specific post, it seems. here it is.]
So yeah, texturl's on my blogroll now. Was probably only a matter of time before I circled around to it.
For no particular reason, I've settled on 25 as about the limit for what I can put on the list. Am finding it not too difficult to jettison some to accomplish this, however. At least not yet.
<addition time="a few minutes later" context="while surfing links that seem to interconnect the nodes I'm interested in">
My first sense of blog interconnections and "circles" was that they were likely to be relatively static and impermeable. My initial experiences seem to indicate more permeability than I had suspected...I ended up linking to, and then being linked from, many of the people whose writing I most enjoyed. Hrmmm. What to think? Open? Closed? Permeable? Impermeable? Unpredictable? Inevitable? Still too early to say, I think.
</addition>
