Why is this of interest:
A good example of what Anna has called network visuality. Digg (for those living on Mars) is a social news aggregation site that allows users to submit as story and for other uses to rank it in terms of interest by either ‘digging’ the submission either up or down, or ‘burying’ the submission if deemed innacurate or offensive.
Digg ‘swarm’ uses Flash and Javascript to dynamically visualize the submission of stories, the amount of ‘diggs’ they recieve, the frequency of diggs or the activity of ‘digging’ as it occurs, and the activity of the users who are actively ‘digging’ stories. This makes for an evocative image of the Digg network activity. Stories grow into centrally weighted clusters, user activity concentrate around larger clusters, lone stories pop-up, float in limbo or sometimes just disapear.
The Site allows you to choose between visualizations of ‘popular stories’, ‘newly submitted stories’, or ‘all activity’. The visualization represents submitted stories with circles filled with the headline of the story in a standard sized font. While the story has few diggs the headline is largely obfuscated by the boundaries of its circle. As the story receives more Diggs the circle increases in size and reveals more of the headline. Active users are represented by filled cell-like circle and the activity of the user stipulates the size of the cell. These users swarm around the stories circles that they digg, connecting to them momentarily like bees to pollen. As users move between stories their movements forge an association between those stories signified by a momentary vector flashing on screen. Clusters of stories emerge as stories associated by user movement increasingly move closer together. Rolling over a story enlarges the title beyond the bounds of the circle so we can read it and makes all of its ‘associations’ visible. Associations are given a line weight according to the amount of like movements by users. Clicking on a story enlarges it to centre screen allowing the user to read the story, see the number of diggs it has recieved, its full abstract, number of comments, etc. While the story is enlarged all its associations are displayed in static form.
This engine is ripe for analysis I’ll only take a brief swipe at it. The three options I mention above are really interesting when viewed in comparison. Viewing ‘popular stories’ shows Digg to be a vibrant and dynamic community of busy submission digging bees that appear to display all the questionable ‘intelligence’ or perhaps simply ‘emergent properties’ of other tyoes of swarm activity. Form this view Digg looks like a vibrant space of interaction. Cut to ‘newly submitted stories’ and the activity looks quite different. The screen displays the most recent submitted stories floating around in what resembles an almost entropic state – liquid rather then gas; there is no energy available and little evidence of emerging swarms. Single-dugg stories dominate the visualization. This image of the network looks like heat death. Looking at ‘all activity’ provides a nice aggregate of the former two, the network associations are more chaotic here because they are not restricted to just the popular stories, emerging clusters appear to overlap and interact and the stability of clusters and swarm activity over time is much more transient and the activity much more frenetic. This perspective looks like and eternal proto-network where there is plenty of available energy but the emergence of any coherence is transitory. The ‘life’ of clusters and the period of swarms representing a hint of complexity in a sea of chaos.