Changes to RSS to make mapping easier
As part of my mapping experiment I had to parse through HTML and determine by heuristics which link was the RSS feed for the particular URL etc. There were two problems with this:

• Determining if the link was a RSS file: naming conventions vary widely, any chance we could all agree to use .rss as the extension?
• Extend the RSS schema to include referrals as part the schema. This would allow very fast mapping of blog relationships.

These two changes would allow blogs to be machine mappable without the current crufty coding required to walk through HTML files. This should lead to lots of unintended consequences....
- posted by John McDowall @ 4:27 PM   

 
Mapping my Neighborhood
For a while I have been interested in different ways to look at information and how people interact to create new ideas. After talking about it for a while I decided it was time to actually do something about it. So over the holidays I hacked together some code to map the surrounding blog space from a starting URL. It is still a little buggy i.e. I get unexpected results sometime. The code parses a starting URL builds a map matching links to URL feeds using several heuristics. The rational is that if you have an RSS feed you are likely a blogger therefore you are included in the map. This does exclude some notable sites and may include some non-bloggers but it gives a pretty good initial picture. This is the first image map of my local neighborhood to a depth of three links removed. Now that I have all this information at my finger tips the interesting thing is what can I do with it and what other relationships can I start to determine and visualize.
- posted by John McDowall @ 9:05 AM