Since all my colleagues before me started their first blog post with an introduction I will do the same. My name is Goran Hacek and I am one of the developers here at Bumblehood.
Today I would like to share the results of one of my side projects with you. As the size of the Bumblehood content database has grown significantly, a need for tools that provide insight into the state of that content arose. One of the tools that I have been working on is for visualizing link states in local guides - today we are making this tool publicly available. You can access it by following this link.
The tool collects data about internal topic linking and visualizes that data in an informative and at the same time visually appealing way. Local guides are displayed as radial trees of topics. In the center of an image is the root of a tree, and all nodes in particular depth are placed on a circle with the same radius; as the node depth grows so does the circle radius.
Topics are displayed as circles. Their interior radius represents the number of outgoing links from that topic while its border width represents the number of incoming links (number of Bumblehood internal links that are pointing to that topic). Labels are displayed only for leafs of a topic guide and their size is calculated by taking both the number of outgoing and incoming links into account.
We have a couple more ideas about what to visualize and in which way (I will write more about this in the following posts), but if you have any ideas of your own about what could be interesting for you to see please don’t hesitate to write on our forums. Also, tell us your opinions about these visualizations.
Posted by Goran Hacek on August 31st, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: Software team --- Comments on Forum
