An email from Priya around location-based blogging, triggered thoughts of visualization tools for mapping blogs, online and mobile social networks & services.  My very first experience of visualization tools was at the Blog Tribe at Ryze - Ross Mayfield blogged details on this project a while ago.

Some cool tools in this area :

- blog chalking - where blogs are linked to location 

- blogmapper - where the reverse happens and locations linked to blogs

- vizster (link via danah boyd) - interactive sociograms for exploring links between members of online social networks

- touchgraph - neat visualisations of livejournal blogs and google browser among other things - Blogstreet uses this in its visualizations of neighbourhood ecosystems for blogs (thanks Ram for the pointer)

- dodgeball - on a tangent, still interesting - location based mobile phone networks 

Made me think that these are indicative of how we are changing in the way we think of 'place' in this virtual world.  It is not necessarily location specific, in some cases may be neighbourhoods and networks of friends and communities with shared affinities.  In others, like Blogstreet's neighbourhoods - blog ecosystems that cluster blogs similar in thought and content.  In a third, a more conventional sense of physical space. 

People like Valdis Krebs and danah boyd seem to be doing a lot of interesting work in the area of developing visual landscapes and visualizations of different forms and levels of social networks.  And there's a search on for tools for visualising weblog conversations !

In a related note, Lilia has been thinking of city as a metaphor for blogging, and Ton has written a thought-provoking article on Founding a City in Cyberspace.  Wonder what visualizations this metaphor for blogging, networks and communities could potentially yield.

UPDATE !

More to add to the list - plucking them out from the comments to this post - these from Valdis - a screen shot of the Spanish Blogosphere mapping and metrics and "Measuring the Spanish Blogosphere" - and this one from Ross - Visualizing Socialtext Collaboration - where a team has used Socialtext to cut project cycles by 1/3 and reduce group email from 100 to zero. 

Thanks for the valuable additions :).

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