URL: http://labs.digg.com/stack/
Why is this of interest:
See previous entry on Digg ‘Swarm’. Stack is another ‘Flash’ visualisation of activity of the Digg socially aggregated ‘news’ site. In this one users are who ‘digg’ stories are represented by small squares falling through the visualisation from top to bottom. These contribute to the height of stacks (like a standard bar graph) that represent stories.
Popular stories have higher stacks and a varying shade of green. As a user ‘diggs’ a story the headline of that story cascades down in a dynamically updating vertical scroll. You can veiw up to a hundred stories at once or zoom in to a subset. That part of the interface is decidedly chunky though. The time period between opening the visualization and the current time is represented either side of the bar graph. it should be noted that the ‘time’ of aall these visualizations (including swarm) is bracketed by the users interaction with the interface. The three ‘perspectives’ I refered to in the ‘Swarm’ post are here as well and display the same dynamic I noted in that post.
‘Popular stories’ focuses on centres of emergence and might be seen to mimic Digg’s propensity for feeding into a questionable value system. ‘Newly submitted stories’ shows the ‘actual’ topology of Digg in-the-present-moment in that the majority of stories remain unviewed and ’single-dugg’ – very few submitted stories ‘take’. All-activity shows complex and transient ‘minor’ centers of emergence in a chaotic moment and movement in the unrelenting stream of submitted stories.