I just read about the Wikipedia 3D Explorer over at Dan's blog. It's sweet and the type of visualization I want us to be able to do for social networks for science. It's built on WPF and I think it's another example of how content on the Web can break free from the Web browser abstraction. Like Dan, I particularly liked the 'network' mode.
Some time ago I suggested that I was working on some ideas related to microformats and social networking and that I was going to experiment with those ideas via my own blog. That part is still coming but most of those ideas have further evolved and I am now pushing them within Microsoft as part of my new role. The term 'overlay webs' has been replaced by the term 'knowledge mashups' 🙂 but the concepts are similar: the use of microformats to capture and combine knowledge in a distributed fashion and the use of the Web as the world's distributed knowledge (rather than just information) network.
Here are a couple of screenshots from the Wikipedia 3D Explorer.
3 responses to “Wikipedia 3D Explorer and Social Networking”
I’m underwealmed, there has to be a better way to visualise social networks:
http://blog.whatfettle.com/2006/09/30/visualising-wikipedia/
Paul, I missed that entry. Cool stuff.
Lots more here: http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html