Thanks to Jon...

Thanks to Jon Udell for pointing out my graph project. Unfortunately I do not think it was ready for the attention. I have some ideas on how to make it more useable and a lot more robust.

He does bring up some interesting points - similar issues have been discussed on Ross Mayfield's Social Networks. Where does technology help form communities and when does it get in the way. Jon's take on WebX is that it was getting in the way, of creating a community. Blogs are much easier but need some way of providing feedback more like threaded discussions.

To create social networks that can exerts political pressure it is necessary to bind them together to exert the collective will. This binding may be very transient but to impact any political process it must exist.

Interactive version with deep crawling

Working under the principle that it is better to release than not I put up another version of the blog map thing (need to think of a name). It has the two types of crawling 1) Shallow takes the node you select and finds all the rss/rdf feeds listed on the page - quick and painless. 2) Deep: gets all the links on the page and follows them down to see if they have a RSS feed that matches the link. If so they are a blog and so save. - this is slow.... Have patience I hope you will be rewarded with pretty pictures. There are still many bugs but I am having fun playing with it so I thought I would share the fun.Graph Toool