MyBlogLog Graph, originally uploaded by Aldon.

Last night, as I was surfing blogs on MyBlogLog, I stumbled across blogs focusing on various forms of spirituality. I noticed a bunch of them had been visited by people interested in the Law of Attraction and in the Karma Sutra. These sites, in turn had been visited by people trying to sell jewelry or perfume on their websites.

It struck me that creating some sort of map of MySpace might be an interesting project. Initially, I thought of using a package something like Visio where I could draw diagrams and move pieces around at will. I searched for free open source software and thought for a moment of downloading Dia. It looks like an interesting package, but seems to be focused primarily computer diagrams like entity relationship diagrams and UML diagrams. Ideally, I’d like to find something a little more freeform. As I write this blog entry, I’m downloading a version of Dia which I’ll experiment with a little bit later.

I also installed Graphviz. Graphviz is a great open-source tool for graphing different types of networks. Like Dia, it isn’t as freeform as I would like, but it is incredibly easy to set up a graph. For example, setting up a directed graph in Graphviz can be as simple as this:

digraph g {
Hello -> World
}

So, I started recording my visits to sites on MyBlogLog in a text file. I set it up as a directed graph. My own site I set up as a blue box,

aldon [shape=box fillcolor=blue style=filled]

Then, for each site that has recently visited my site, I put in a directed link

aldon -> cityguide
aldon -> keeekeee
aldon -> dk2
aldon -> jyhrus
aldon -> topcat1
aldon -> sarahridgley
aldon -> jamsodonnell

When I visited a site, I added a line to mark it as a box. If it was a friend, I filled the box red. Of course every time I visited a site, MyBlogLog would list me as the most recent visitor, so all the sites should point back to me as a visitor.

The list became quite large very quickly, especially for people that had many people listed on their site. So, I edited down the list of unfollowed links for my first version of this graph.

Moving forward, I’ll probably do a few more graphs like this. I may end up doing a few more graphs like this. I may try to embed pictures into the graphs, or if I can set it up nicely, make it a clickable graph.

I’ve kicked around the idea of scraping MyBlogLog screens, but there are rumors of an API so I’ll probably wait for this. (Side note to any folks at Yahoo or MyBlogLog that read this, if you want to give me early access, I’d love to test the MyBlogLog api together with Graphviz)

Of course, all of this doesn’t get me to the mind map that I talked about at the beginning of this post. Perhaps the best way to do that would be to use tags. That is even further down the track, but starts getting into some of the most interesting parts, tracking the flow of ideas.

I read various blogs on MyBlogLog. Sometimes I’ll link to them. Other times, their ideas lodge themselves into my mind, mix with other ideas and eventually work themselves out into blog posts in some sort of large unconscious online social blogging matrix. Exploring this social blogging matrix is where things can get really interesting.