Lemak Lemang

Nth degrees of Internet separation

Jun 19, 2006 20:06

No, this is not my DNA profile. But close enough.

Jeffooi.com as seen as a Social Network Analysis (SNA) site graph

It's actually how my other blog at jeffooi.com looks like when transferred onto graphs. Thanks to Switzerland-based painter Sala, who created this Java applet-based visualizer called "Websites-as-Graphs", I can now interpret how my blog links to other Unique Resource Locators in cyberspace in the form of site graphs derived from HTML tags.

As I feature a lot of JPEG files, embedded links and block-quotes in my blog, you get to see some significant colored dots where violet denotes images (the IMG tag), blue for embedded links (the A tag), orange refers to line breaks and block-quotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags), and black is for the HTML tag and root node.

Of course, you don't get to see as much of the other colors as I don't readily feature tables (red), DIV tag (green), forms (yellow) with the exception of some gray, which illustrates "other tags".


With this visualizer, I can now take a peep into the global social network that I have "accidentally" created in cyberspace over the last three-and-half years that I have been blogging.

It's actually an extension of that famous phrase--Six Degrees of Separation--which was coined after a 1967 small world experiment by psychologist Stanley Milgram who says that two random US citizens are connected by, at most, six acquaintances.

The degree of separation on the Internet is even more intimately closer. Somehow in 2005, Internet-based experiments like the Ohio State University's Electronic Small World Project and Columbia University's Small World Project have sort of confirmed that it takes about five to seven degrees of separation to connect any two people together through the Net.

With Sala's visualizer, I get only an outline of my global social network without knowing for sure where and who they are. I prefer it that way, or else this world, with the entire virtual community buzzing and bugging you, can be a tad too noisy.

Meanwhile, I will just keep track of how folks at Flickr.com, a foremost social networking application, are morphing out new patterns of social network analysis (SNA) as represented by such efforts like "blogsasgraphs" and "websitesasgraphs".

In fact, on Flickr.com, the graph-site-blog cluster is fast enlarging.

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