Today, I want to talk to you about world changing. I get very excited about world changing. I’m going to take it from three angles – art, data, and people.

I’m going to try and convince you, that if you’re an idealist – if you used to daydream (or still do) about being a superhero then being a software engineer is one way to achieve that. I’m going to try and explain why I love what I do so much. One of my mentors described me as a “social animal” – this is ridiculous because we’re human – we’re all social animals. I guess software engineers are often the glaring, anti-social exception to the rule.

But, I love people. Particularly, I love connecting people. At the moment I’m involved in Girl Geek Dinners in KW, which is about connecting women in tech to one another, and Awesome Foundation KW, which is about connecting people with awesome ideas to amazing people who love their idea and will give them money and help them make it reality. By day, I work on mobile social. We want to connect people, you, to who and what and where will be interesting.

I moved in the fall, and I found out what was going on and met people via Twitter but it’s still not easy, and there are a lot of ways that we can do better at enabling real-world experience through software. What does this have to do with world-changing? It turns out that when you connect people in new ways, they make new, incredible things happen. Data might be the most promising tool to address some of the biggest challenges humanity faces. New kinds of technology has meant new means of creating art, and in fact, that art can be a helpful tool in telling both of these stories.

Art

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Movies have long pushed the boundaries of what is technically possible. I love that video because I think it’s a lighting view of how technology has progressed over the last 100 years.

I watch it, and it makes me excited for what happens next.

What does this mean for world-changing? Second Life is an online virtual world – what if it could help people who are disabled experience things they otherwise couldn’t?

Credit: postsecret

Postsecret is an online, collaborative art project. People send in their secrets on post-cards, and a blog-post collecting some is published each week.

I look forward to it each week – sometimes hilarious, sometimes sad, always thought-provoking.

But, more than being an art project – a postcard someone sent in prompted a campaign against suicide on the San Francisco Bay Bridge [video]. A Facebook fan page titled “please don’t jump” was created, and gathered over 6000 fans. People gathered on the bridge to release balloons and leave flowers and messages of hope. In fact, one of the people there missed the group, but ended up talking someone down from the ledge.

An art project – hosted on Blogger – but because of the way communities can connect online, it became a movement for hope, for those who need it.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

This is one of my absolute favorite projects, I saw it live for the first time in New York in the fall and I was completely taken with it – it’s actually interactive. To me it represents the intersection of art, and programming – which is why I love it so much. But it also shows us the stories we can tell using visualization.

Data

There is a mind-blowing TED talk by Hans Rosling. It’s literally called “Hans Rosling shows you the best stats you’ve ever seen“. It’s amazing. I’m going to show you a shorter, but equally mind-blowing talk.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

The graph he’s using gives a fourth dimension to the data, because the movement shows the passing of time. The animation helps him tell a compelling story.

Credit: flickr / catspyjamasnz

There’s more information put online every day, than you can hope to read in your lifetime. And so we talk about the data deluge, and filter failure. Data is also an opportunity. Google used the sheer volume of data available for crunching to improve machine translation.

Mapping the Human Diseasome

Mapping the Human ‘Diseasome’, an interactive graphic – see it at the New York Times.

There was a lot of data that we had, but with no sensible means of making sense of it, what was the point of collecting it? Now – I think data crunching on a huge scale will be the biggest source of improvements in healthcare over the course of the next century.

People

I was trying to explain to someone non-technical what I did recently, and it wasn’t going well. Eventually, she said, “oh – you work for the internet”.

I didn’t know what to say to that, and then we started running these chrome ads. Every one so far has made me cry. They make me think, yes, I do work for the internet.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

We can talk about “the Facebook Revolution” – it’s exciting. It’s important. But every day there are small but significant things, where people are using the internet to connect and help each other.

Like Kiva. Kiva is a site for micro-lending, it allows users to make loans to people in developing countries so that they can grow their business and hopefully lift themselves out of poverty. Many people prefer to loan to women, because they use the money to support their families with education, healthcare etc.

It’s not a one-to-one relationship. Loans are split into $25 chunks and a number of different people contribute to make up the loan amount.

Credit: flickr / victoriapeckham

Recently a British footballer had an… interlude with a Big Brother housemate. Why am I telling you this? Despite watching Keeping up with the Kardashians in times of stress, it’s not the kind of thing I’m normally interested in.

But this footballer wanted to keep this a secret, as you would – right? Big Brother housemates do tend to be rather… odd. So he took out something called a “super-injunction” to stop news outlets publishing the story. Thing is, everyone knows who he is because this snippet of gossip has been tweeted by 75,000 people.

Do we really need these details of celebrities lives to be public? No. But the world has changed, and everyone can be a publisher now, even if they limit themselves to 140 characters or less. And this changes the rules of the game. It’s hard to have the same threat over so many people (and you don’t even know who they are!) as you can over a finite number of news outlets. The old system of trading favors and coercion doesn’t scale. The US government was playing whackamole trying to shut down wikileaks. Wikileaks just made it easy for people to mirror the site. There’s a fascinating book called Bloggers on the Bus (Amazon) which is all about how bloggers changed the last US presidential election. In the UK, MPs expenses were investigated by crowd-sourcing.

Everyone has the option to be a media outlet now. An unimaginable number of people are taking it. Software, like Blogger and WordPress make it really easy.

Ultimately…

Technology is  like any other tool. You can use a hammer to build a house, or you can use it to attack someone, similarly you can use the tools available for good – or for evil.

We can cheer each other with lolcats, or we can torment with rickrolling.

The internet can be the ultimate procrastination tool. Wikipedia and Google Docs can make you more effective at studying. Endless videos of cats and social networking can mean nothing gets done.

A group of unconnected strangers can fund a business in a developing country and help someone lift themselves out of poverty. But teenagers (and non-teenagers) can find new ways to torment each other using social media.

It’s possible to start a revolution online, now. But it’s also possible for governments to invade people’s privacy and watch them like never before.

I’m hoping you’ll leave here with knowledge of some new superpowers today. Ultimately, it’s up to you what you do with them.

I hope, though, that you won’t be evil.

Temporal Rhythms for #ESE

Color scheme:

1. Is directed at someone by starting with an @
2. Contains a mention (@) of someone else
3. Contains a link

Disappointingly, no patterns are immediately obvious here – it seems like tweeting was reasonably consistent throughout. I removed directed points to see if that made a difference.

Temporal Rhythms for #ESE - no directed

Not really! Although now there are some small gaps – session breaks, perhaps?

Code-wise, I reused this.

To start with, I looked at the social network that emerges when we look at the people on the list.

Future of the News Network

This network is pretty densely connected, with the exception of two users on the list. You can see their nodes floating away in the image below:

Future of the News Network - Outliers

The network graph that emerges from all the tweets connected is really busy, but may show who the most engaged users are.

Future of the News Network - Full

There’s just too much information here, so I started filtering it by eliminating nodes that had fewer than a specified minimum number of connections. Because of the dataset available, non-news-influencer nodes cannot be connected to each other. Thus, I was specifying how many influencers needed to mention a user for them to make it into the graph.

Future of the News Network - Minimum 2

Setting the minimum to two dramatically reduces the size of the graph. Many of the nodes remaining are also well known, for example @jack and @alyssa_milano.

Future of the News Network - Minimum 3

We can also see popular websites, like @techcrunch and @boingboing as well as @google (not surprising given how often google showed up in the earlier visualizations of tweet content.

Future of the News Network - Minimum 4

Future of the News Network - Minimum 5

Future of the News Network - Minimum 6

Future of the News Network - Minimum 7

Future of the News Network - Minimum 8

Future of the News Network - Minimum 9

Future of the News Network - Minimum 10

I find the graphs for minimum 8+ fascinating – I think they start to show who influences the influencers.

Future of the News Network - Minimum 11

Eventually, of course, we get back to our original graph.

I decided to try the layout in Processing and to keep it simple, by following an easy rule for creating color. Start with black (the absence of color) and add red, then when red was saturated add blue, and finally green until we reach white. Because there is no yellow in the pattern, I used yellow for the background.

I’m not entirely happy with the very centre (I think this is a consequence of having to convert between double and float) but it’s pretty cool:

Using a different strategy for changing color (essentially generating every even numbered RGB value) with smaller radius and spacing, I made the image below.

I love this layout!

I use Java in Eclipse with the core.jar library. You can use this code in the Processing Editor with some small modifications.

Code

import processing.core.PApplet;

public class SunflowerSeeds extends PApplet {

	private static final int radius = 10;
	private static final int scale = 7;

	private static final double goldenangle = Math.PI * (3 - Math.sqrt(5));

	private static final int wh = 400;

	public void setup() {
		size(wh, wh);
		background(255, 255, 0);
		noLoop();
	}

	public void draw() {
		int r = 0;
		int g = 0;
		int b = 0;

		int n = 0;

		double a = 0;

		while (g < 255) {
			if (r < 255) {
				r++;
			}
			else if (b < 255) {
				b++;
			}
			else {
				g++;
			}

			double h = Math.sqrt(n)*scale;
			double x = wh/2 + Math.sin(a) * h;
			double y = wh/2 + Math.cos(a) * h;

			stroke(0);
			fill(r, g, b);
			ellipse((float) x, (float) y, radius, radius);

			a+=goldenangle;
			n++;
		}
	}
}

Code for Animated Version

import processing.core.PApplet;

public class SunflowerAnimated extends PApplet{

	private static final int radius = 10;
	private static final int scale = 7;

	private static final double goldenangle = Math.PI * (3 - Math.sqrt(5));

	private static final int wh = 400;

	private int r = 0;
	private int g = 0;
	private int b = 0;

	private int n = 0;
	private double a = 0;

	public void setup() {
		size(wh, wh);
		background(255, 255, 0);
	}

	public void draw() {
		if (g >= 255) {
			noLoop();
			return;
		}
		else if (r < 255) {
			r++;
		}
		else if (b < 255) {
			b++;
		}
		else {
			g++;
		}

		double h = Math.sqrt(n)*scale;
		double x = wh/2 + Math.sin(a) * h;
		double y = wh/2 + Math.cos(a) * h;
		a+=goldenangle;
		stroke(0);
		fill(r, g, b);
		ellipse((float) x, (float) y, radius, radius);

		n++;
	}
}

Twitter: An Overview

Who doesn’t use Twitter? Who doesn’t use Twitter because they think it’s pointless?

Before I start, I want to give a really brief overview of Twitter and how it works so that what follows makes sense.

This is the main page that I see on Twitter.com. What I’ve marked as the “stream” is the tweets from the people I “follow” – they’re marked on the right. I follow about 220 people. I’ve also marked out where it shows the people who follow me. I don’t follow all of them back, but it’s important to note that this doesn’t stop them mentioning me, or retweeting me.

On this page, I can see who’s mentioned me or engaged in conversation with me recently (by which I mean, a tweet starting with @catehstn). By selecting that tweet, I can see what (if any) tweet of mine they responded to.

Here I can see the tweets of mine that have been retweeted using Twitter’s relatively recent “retweet” button. Clicking on it, shows me the users who retweeted it.

Finally, these are people I’ve retweeted. Like the last screen, clicking on a tweet shows me who else retweeted it.

Credit: Geek and Poke

People who don’t use Twitter often tell me that Twitter is in fact boring people going on about their tedious lives…

Credit: Geek and Poke

… and in particular sharing with the world what they had for lunch.

It’s funny, because that’s actually why I stopped reading the Facebook news feed.

Anyway, personally I get a lot of value out of Twitter and I think it has and continues to prove it’s value as a medium – with the breaking news about the plane in the Hudson, the Iran election, and every day for businesses as a customer service medium.

Credit: Geek and Poke

It’s hard at first, though, and Twitter can seem a bit like talking to oneself in public. However, it really is what users make of it, which is why I find it particularly interesting. When I showed you the page showing my directed messages, you can see that I can ask a question and people give me sensible answers. And invite me to go skiing. That’s pretty awesome.

People Are Weird

Credit: thisischris.com

danah boyd does amazing research into how people - particularly teens – use social networking service. She posted some examples from her recent field work on her blog, and there were a couple of techniques that teens use to manage their presence on Facebook that are really interesting. Firstly, is deleting everything. Every wall post, every message, is deleted after it’s read and responded to. Status updates are left briefly, then removed as well. Secondly, is deactivating the account every logout, so that interactions can only take place when the teen is online to manage them.

These behaviours are extreme, but to me illustrate why studying people’s behavior in the micro is interesting. At one point, if you sampled an “average” Twitter user, they would have no followers and have never tweeted anything. People use Twitter in really different ways, and the purpose of what we’re doing is to try and capture some patterns that we can pick out to characterize types of users.

Who uses a social networking service – any – in a way that is “weird”? I, for example, read my whole stream. One of my friends tells me I’m completely mad to do that, and I think she get’s frustrated because she’ll start telling me something and I’ll say, “oh I saw that tweet”.

Credit: Michael Weiss

We created this diagram to capture the different levels of interaction users have with one another. At the centre, the direct message, is the most intimate and private form of communication on Twitter. We can’t measure these. Then there are two kinds of active engagement – commenting on content, or conversing (messages that start with an @) and retweeting – when a user shares something they’ve seen with all their followers too. Then there is “listening” – this is reading the tweet, maybe clicking on the link, but not commenting. And finally we have ignoring.

We all move between the different types of interaction types, and our interaction patterns with different users will likely be very different. I definitely converse with people I never retweet, for example! Spammers, though, are always at the outside – they are interested only in pushing their content, not consuming that of other people.

Using Visualization

Credit: geograph.org.uk

So, why do we use visualization? Because we don’t really know what’s going on, exactly, and it’s helpful in looking for patterns.

It’s been shown on Twitter as well as on Facebook that whilst the “declared” set of friends produces a dense graph, the subset of people the user actually interacts with is much smaller and produces a much sparser overall graph. Whilst the number of people we are “friends” with can continue to increase, the number that are interacted with plateaus.

So we started by graphing user’s conversation networks, which is all very well if it’s fairly small like my friend Jen’s…

@jliyi

But get’s harder as it get’s bigger…

@kittenthebad

And eventually all we can really say is that they have a really huge network…

@krusk

… and it’s really very densely connected…

@anitaborg_org

I want to call out this last one, because this is a person, tweeting on behalf and as part of an organization – and she’s produced this crazily connected graph. I see it in my stream, because I see her engaging with people I know, and with myself, but this graph really shows how far reaching it is. I think Twitter’s ability to allow an entity, an organization, to build a community this way is actually quite unique, and really different from Facebook fan pages, for example.

Too Many LINES! What’s Going On?

So it’s hard to draw conclusions once the graphs get of any complexity. It’s really easy to pick out spammers, because they have a lot of out messages and no incoming messages, or just no interaction at all, but beyond that it’s really a question of light/moderate/heavy user characterization.

However the networks have a lot of singly connected nodes, and what we really want to see is the most densely connected core of the graph. We do this using clique finding.

I’m not going to go into the algorithm here, it’s very standard. We use a small optimization to remove nodes with fewer connections than our minimum clique size -1, and that’s it. It’s coded in Haskell, which is fast enough and has enough optimizations that going beyond that actually slowed the running time.

@jliyi cliques size 3+

@jliyi cliques size 4+

With Jen, from the cliques and the conversation graph, we can see that she only talks to a few people who also talk to each other. It suggests to me that she mostly uses Twitter to talk to people she knows.

@kittenthebad cliques size 3+

@kittenthebad cliques size 4+

@kittenthebad cliques size 5+

This is me, before I changed my Twitter handle. These images are just snapshots – I know my network now would look very different than it did when I created this, over a year ago. My network is bigger, and I can pull out two key communities that I was involved in, my friends, and the tech community in Ottawa.

@krusk cliques size 3+

@krusk cliques size 4+

@krusk cliques size 5+

@krusk cliques size 6+

Kelly is super-connected, especially within Ottawa. And you see this in her graph, I think, that she’s strongly connected to other people who are very connected. She’s a local influencer, so if you want a message to spread in Ottawa she’s someone who’s very capable of making that happen.

@anitaborg_org cliques size 3+

I love this graph. I see all these disjoint communities relevant to women in technology, that this account is connected to.

@anitaborg_org cliques size 4+

@anitaborg_org cliques size 5+

@anitaborg_org cliques size 6+

@anitaborg_org cliques size 7+

In these graphs we can really see the strength and connectivity of the @anitaborg_org network. Why is this important? Because it’s an organization, not an individual. Facebook would have you make a fan page (weird), or “friend” a brand (creepy), but on Twitter the brand can just be part of the conversation. Especially for something like @anitaborg_org, which is about connecting women in tech to each other and driving those opportunities, this is really something that is much harder to do on Facebook or via blogs, if it’s possible at all. Something important to consider, is that the person who manages the account could change, but as long as the new person continued in a similar vein, the community would continue.

Influence

Credit: Geek and Poke

There’s this idea that to be influential, you need a lot of followers. And I really think we’ve moved past that, and most people now know that’s completely meaningless. Influence is about a user’s ability to get people to act. Klout tries to capture that with a number.

They have all these metrics, and people you’re influenced by (and an influencer of), and the topics you’re influential on, but what does the number really mean? I’m less influential than Clay Shirky but more influential than some of my friends?

I think this misses some context. There’s people who you can influence to say, go for dinner (an action in the offline world), and there’s people you can influence to start a conversation, then there are people you can influence to retweet your content. These are all different, and very likely they are around different topics as well.

Let’s talk about Mommy bloggers. Hugely influential – amongst each other. But are they influential to non-mommy bloggers? Are they influential on non-mommy-blogger topics? Can we capture the more nuanced aspects of influence when we just use numbers?

What’s Next?

Future of the News

This is some work that I did with a friend working in Communications – she’s doing a discourse analysis on the future of the news and collected a dataset from Twitter – two months of tweets from a number of users who were deemed influential in this debate. Here I’ve really been chopping up the data in different ways to see if I can help her draw some conclusions from it.

This graph is just a summary of how many tweets and of what kind there are from each user in the dataset.

The key is as follows:

1. Is directed at someone by starting with an @
2. Contains a mention (@) of someone else
3. Contains a link

This is my favorite visualization, because you can see the rhythms of someone’s day. Pale grey tweets are tweets that don’t fall into either of the above three categories, so typical “me-forming” tweets will be grey, as will short opinions. You expect to see some grey tweets, but in particular the user below has a lot:

We also see very few mentions of other users, suggesting that they are not as interactive.

With these graphs, you can see the gap which is nighttime for that user (and so when they are asleep) – but Dave Winer’s is my absolute favourite, because you can see that he pretty much doesn’t sleep!

Wordles are not statistically accurate, however I think in the context of this – where really, we’re just looking for things to look for – they’re helpful. We can pick out key topics like “google”, “ipad”, in the one above and below:

We can also see hints of certain behaviors, looking at the blow wordle you can see that the guy below probably retweets people who mention him a lot!

And this guy tweets the same website a lot.

I used some visualizations from Many Eyes for different ways of exploring the text:

For example, we can see what phases follow a certain word, like “news”.

And the other visualization shows the relationship between words.

Exploring a Conference Hashtag

Again, we use a wordle to get a sense of what is being discussed. Eclipe and ESE are the big ones, and whilst we might expect a lot of retweets given the size of “RT” this is skewed by the announcement of a product called “Eclipse RT”. On the left we can also see some influential users in this community – @IanSkerrett for example.

By graphing the frequency of users tweeting X number of times, we can see that the majority of users who participated in tweeting about the conference tweeted just once (with the hashtag), thus a minority of users tweeting up to 26 times with the hashtag are likely to be the ones driving any conversation around the hashtag.

Next, we look at client usage (counted once per user per client, so users with a lot of tweets do not skew the distribution, but use of multiple clients is counted). Despite the open source nature of Eclipse we see a significant number of users on Blackberry, iPhone, and iPad. The web Twitter client is most popular, by some margin.

Here we look at how many clients users used. Note, the users who tweeted only once will of course cause a spike for one, but it was interesting to see that some users use up to five clients.

We can see here that users of the #ese hashtag came from all over the world – the conference was held in Germany.

However the vast majority have their language set to English.

Creating a wordle of user’s bios gives us a sense of how they describe themselves – Software, Java, Developer, and Eclipse stand out.

I find this one of the most interesting graphs, because it shows that the peek for this group of users joining Twitter (not representative of all users, as more technically savvy, lots of programmers/developers etc) happened in early 2009. This is not at all like the trend graph we can get for users searching “twitter” on Google.

Finally, I created networks of the mentions between users – this time there are just two colours, directed (starts with an @) and within, for example a retweet, or a “Great talk by @user on …”.

Lots of the users in the dataset are not connected to this network, but we do see a densely connected core. It seems likely that these people are the ones tweeting more, and are really driving the conversation around the conference.

Summary

• People use Twitter in a myriad of different ways.
• Visualization allows us to explore patterns and characterize usage.
• Clique finding extracts the densely connected network that matters.
• How can we use visualization to explore communities on Twitter?

Interestingly, it turns out there is an Eclipse product called “Eclipse RT”, so perhaps there weren’t as many retweets as the wordle might have suggested…

Still – 413 of the 640 tweets in the data set contained an @ mention of some kind. Of these, 72 were “directed” (by which I mean, start with an @).

I created network graphs using Prefuse. There are two kinds of links – included in an directed tweet (yellow), and included in a non-directed tweet (purple).

This split is because to me there seems a clear distinction between a conversational directed tweet, and a mention – at a conference, if someone’s speaking a tweet might consist of <quote> + <credit> – this is sharing the person’s ideas with the audience of your twitter stream, but will not normally be denoted by retweet notation.

As yet, I haven’t created and uploaded an applet – for now, you can see the screenshots below. Some observations:

• There’s a dense graph, which the vast majority of users are not connected to.
• There are a few two-person connections separate from the graph.
• The bulk of the activity takes place in this core.

I think it’ll be interesting to apply some clique finding to this. I’m also interesting in applying this distinction (directed vs. mention) to temporal rhythms – thinking along the lines of what I created here.

You can get an idea of what people were talking about in the wordle, below (applet is here):

Apparently there were a lot of RT’s. We’ll explore that later…

I started off with HTML files that he had grabbed for me, and extracted all the tweet ID’s (regular expressions ftw) and then downloading all the information for each tweet from the API (rate-limiting is the new compiling). Finally I had a spreadsheet with a total of 640 tweets (only one couldn’t be retrieved) from 181 different users.

One user has a total of 26 tweets in the dataset, however the majority just tweeted the hashtag one time. The frequency distribution is shown in the chart, below.

The web and Tweetdeck were by far the most popular clients, as per the chart below. Of course, this can be skewed by users posting more.

To reduce this, I eliminated duplicates of user/source combinations to create the chart below:

TweetDeck now seems slightly less popular! It’s interesting giving the tech-savvy of the users – Eclipse is an IDE, amongst other things, and is also Open Source that the web is so prevalent, and Android less so. Although Twitdroid and Twitter for Android are there they are both dominated by Twitter for iPhone.

Just 38 of the 181 users use multiple clients, although one user uses 5 (!)

Below is a heat map of the locations of the users for the tweets in the dataset. The conference took place in Europe, so many of the participants were from that area but we also see users from North America.

Only 8 tweets (out of the 640 tweet dataset), 1.25% had geo-location data, and just 75 or 11.7% were replies. 55 of user accounts (out of 181), or 30.4% are geo enabled.

I filtered the dataset to keep just one tweet per user (the last one they posted with the conference hashtag).

The location heatmap with the reduced dataset:

Despite the worldwide locations, the vast majority of users have their language set to English:

How do people at the Eclipse Conference describe themselves? Wordles have limitations in terms of statistical significance, but I find them useful for picking out specific themes. The wordle for user’s bios is below (applet here), “Eclipse”, “software”, “Java” and “Developer” feature prominently.

The earliest user joined in December 2006, but some joined relatively recently – in the chart below, we see a spike around February/March 2009 (this makes sense, given the astounding growth of Twitter at that time).

Personally, I use my favorites to collect things I mean to read. So I had a look at how these users were favoriting too. Users had between 0 and 2366 favorites. A median of 43.9, median of 3, and mode of 0 suggest that many of these users don’t use favourites at all. Standard Deviation was obviously large – 204.23.

I graphed follower/following with size proportional to number of lists using Many Eyes.

Finally – URLs. I was surprised that 54 (29.8%) of users did not have a URL in their profile. 3, shockingly, have a Facebook URL (one of which does not have the vanity URL). Blogspot (22 users) is more popular than WordPress (5 users).

Next I’ll be looking at temporal rhythms and mapping @ mentions.

Only letters and spaces were kept for the summary (thus each tweet was treated as one sentence), the summarizer transforms everything to lower case and removes some things like the identifier on bitl.y  and other short links.

For this one, I’m having a little fun, really. Essentially I’ve tried to summarize 2 months of Twitter for each user on a slide, hence the inclusion of their pic (as of now, unfortunately not at the time period covered).

Each image is a link to the applet where you can explore the text and interact with it. Change the linking word on the left – I’ve used space, but “and” or “is” in particular could be enlightening.

I like this visualization because it shows what goes together. The fact that “globe” and “mail” are linked by “and” is perhaps not unexpected, but what does “Google” link to? News? Facebook? Buzz? What do these link to in turn – privacy? Social networking?

Let me know what you find!

Alex Howard	Alfred Hermida
Andrew Keen	Cody Brown
Dan Gillmor	Dave Winer
David Cohn	David Eaves
Dr. Mark Drapeau	Howard Weaver
Jay Rosen	JD Lasica
Jeff Jarvis	Jennifer Preston
Kirk LaPointe	Mark Glaser
Matthew Ingram	Steve Buttry
Steve Outing	Steve Yelvington

Each image is a link to the applet where you can explore the text and interact with it. Change the word in the top left corner to change the root of the tree.

Alex Howard	Alfred Hermida
Andrew Keen	Cody Brown
Dan Gillmor	Dave Winer
David Cohn	David Eaves
Dr. Mark Drapeau	Howard Weaver
Jay Rosen	JD Lasica
Jeff Jarvis	Jennifer Preston
Kirk LaPointe	Mark Glaser
Matthew Ingram	Steve Buttry
Steve Outing	Steve Yelvington