c3's InSide Scoup

The TouchGraph LiveJournal Browser has been re-activated and enhanced.

User interest data is now processed to create interest nodes, which connect to users sharing that interest. "unloaded" icons now appear over user nodes for which friendship data has not yet been retrieved. One builds up the graph by double clicking on unloaded user nodes. Mutually shared interests float over the user clusters. Moving the mouse over an interest highlights users sharing that interest, and moving a mouse over a user highlights the friends and interests of the user. By examining the interests above and between clusters one can see which subjects bring together individuals and communities.

Huminity takes the "total information access" approach to sharing one's network data. Unlike other social networking services such as Friendster or Spoke which protect information about their users, Huminity caters to those who want to share their contacts as broadly as possible. Their desktop based tool makes it easy to enter information about one's network and immediately connect to others who list the same contacts.

NeuroScholar uses TouchGraph as a diagramming tool for showing relations between fragments of neuroscience texts. Users are able to extract relevant portions of published literature and store them together with links indicating their relation. NeuroScholar provides a convenient environment for the user to annotate the data and to navigate it by using TouchGraph's network interface.



Ceryle is an authoring tool designed to assist writers in organizing their research materials and develop narratives. Ceryle includes a built-in XML database and a topic map-based ontology-driven organizer. Cisualization of Ceryle ontologies is performed using TouchGraph, which facilitates the illustration of how different elements of the ontology relate to each other. Ceryle was developed by Murray Altheim.

Bill Koelzer has written a great feature on the TouchGraph GoogleBrowser in RealityTimes "Once you see your interconnected Web revealed to you on the Touchgraph GoogleBrowser, you will never be the same. This is because you will have actually seen that which you could only imagine before." Although the degree to which seeing the graph is life changing is debatable, there is an answer there to the nay-sayers who don't initially get the value of seeing what they already know. Being shown graph of familiar information is like looking at a map of one's neighborhood. One may have had knowledge of it by walking around, but seeing a map of the territory gives one a much better understanding of the proportions involved. One is then able to make scientific judgments where before one could have only made rough estimates.