Why do I love the internet? Because it's inherently spatial. The simple invention of a link turned linear text into an intricate web. A heterarchy which puts Bloom's Taxonomy within the same reach as bread tab taxonomy. I love nothing better than following one link to an other ending up in some tangle of ideas.
With bookmarks, RSS feeds and allowing blogs to digest the internet for us, we can forget just how vast the internet is.
I was delighted to stumble on Websites as Graphs; an applet that begins to remind us how spatial and complex single webpages are. Enter a URL and you watch the organization of a webpage unfurl and settle into a pattern of dots representing links, images, forms, etc.
For example, the above image is the representation of this page.
What the tool lacks in text, it makes up for in simple staring-at-a-fish-tank entertainment. Zürich artist Sala, and author of Aharef, has an explanatory post that compares different sites that will help you get a handle on what you're looking at.
Go ahead, take a look at the shapes behind the pages of linear code you're looking at.
It is especially cool to see the slideshow on Flickr of all the screenshots uploaded by users of Websites as Graphs.
http://flickr.com/photos/tags/websitesasgraphs/show/
Posted by: Peter Durand | June 05, 2006 at 10:57 AM