I recently stumbled upon an interesting blog post at Information Aesthetics about a new visualization of the French Political Blogosphere.
Really impressive and provocative research app.
A few years back I wrote a similar system as part of a research project with Jason Gallo and Eszter Hargittai at Northwestern University.
The SNS-VS system I wrote in 2005, took a seed-list of some political blogs and then spidered them to gather data on their rates of inter-linking. For this I built a Java-based multi-threaded web spider and a Flash-based visualization system. Since it was a side-project I never really had the time to take it as far as I wanted. Nonetheless, it was an interesting app to build and was awarded the "Best Student Software" award from the CITASA that year.
I've always thought I might revisit this, and I have a million ideas for a bigger....badder...spider and visualization system. Who knows, maybe someday soon I'll get to dig into it again....
