I am ceaselessly fascinated by Matthew Hurst’s visualizations of the blogosphere. Today, he views the blogosphere as, yes, a sphere; this map happens to put this blog at the center and shows links to both the tech and socio-political continents.
By the way, it’s called a hyperbolic projection — perfect for a guy who traffics in hyperbole, eh?
I think Hurst is on the brink of something bigger: using the relations among blogs to better map the content of blog and, in turn, the content they look at. This isn’t the semantic web. It’s people organizing the web into topics by their interest and relationships. And knowledge of those topics and the relations around them will be valuable for everything from search engines to social networks to advertisers. Once this is understood better, there is less reason to create closed networks — from a TV network to MySpace — and more opportunity to find the networks that already exist out in the world.
