Greg just pointed out an interesting looking paper to me. Authored by Jure Leskovec and Eric Horvitz at CMU/MSR respectively. World Wide Buzz: Planetary-scale Views on an Instant Messaging Network looks at the nature of IMing by mining a huge volume of data: 30 billion conversations. Among the interesting views of this data is that below, which uses a heatmap metaphor to indicate the most active lines of communication. A line is drawn between the locations of the participants in the converstions. When a line crosses a cell it increases its value (red).
Interesting graphic, but it seems to mislead by the fact that lines of communication only go across the map, not wrap around the outsides.
In its current form if fails to distinguish (for example) between the lines of communication between US-Europe, Europe-Asia/Japan and US-Asia/Japan. This seems very counter intuitive to me!
Posted by: NodalGrrrl | July 17, 2007 at 05:25 PM
Do you think it's possible to filter results on a content (or subject) base?
It is quite curious to see a "yellow iseland" on Zimbabwe, or Botswana?!
Posted by: Marco | July 18, 2007 at 03:03 AM