Weblog Link Explorer

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2006

I have been playing around with Processing and Technorati data and have constructed a small application for exploring the links to a weblog.

See the small image to the right for an example. The central circle is the weblog of interest and all but one of the surrounding circles are weblogs that link to it. The top yellow circle is the weblog previously at the central point - note that the arrow direction is reversed since the arrow shows the link direction. Hover over the outer circles to see the excerpt containing the link. Click on the outer circles to visit those weblogs in a browser window or click on the arrows to change the central weblog of interest. You can also use the entry field at the top to enter an arbitrary weblog to focus on. The little red bars show the authority of the weblog - more red means a greater number of other weblogs that link to it.

Enough with the words - give it a try !

To view this content, you need to install Java from java.com
Built with Processing and using data from Technorati. Thanks to both !

This interactive application is built with Java so if you just see an empty square then you likely need to update the version of Java in your browser. I've also noticed that the Technorati service I'm using to get the data sometimes returns empty result files when it shouldn't. When this happens it will appear as if there are no links to the central weblog and you will just see one circle in the middle.

For those who are interested in the details I'm grabbing the most recent 20 links to the weblog of interest, removing internal links and duplicates, then sorting by the number of inbound weblog links as a measure of authority. This means the outer circles represent the highest authority weblogs that have recently linked to the one in the middle.

 


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