Visualize web connections
Will from Edelman’s DERT team sent me a cool link today that helps visualize the network of connectivity between web sites.
This service from TouchGraph uses Google’s database of related sites to help map this. Whereas it is always interesting (and dare I say it - slightly narcissistic) to use it for your own site - as shown to the left, the real value is when this is used to tool at the reach of individual firms or industries.
By way of example I have also shown below examples from two completely different analyst houses.
Once again the old question regarding quality of audience springs to mind. RedMonk at first glance has a superior reach. This does not mean that Gartner has a poor network as the quality of the people within their ecosystem is extremely high.
Bucaro whilst describing this service explains it quite succinctly:
Some people are saying that this application, although visually interesting, doesn’t provide any more information than a regular google search. If you’re just looking for search results, that’s probably true. But if you want to study the interconnectivity of the Web, it provides much more information.
Admittedly I don’t believe you should read too much into this but if the proverb a picture is worth a thousand words is anything to go by, I wouldn’t dismiss this service just yet.
Technorati Tags: web connectivity, network, touchgraph, google, gartner, redmonk, analyst, analyst relations, edelman, edelman dert
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hey jonny cheers. but let me say- forget reach. i will bet the quality and engagement of my community against Gartner’s every time. I can’t claim they are all IT buyers or CIOs- far from from it. But our model is based on engagement, community quality, and collaborative innovation, not quantity.
Its one reason i have been wondering about the twitter counter in the SMI, for example. For me the inbound tweets are in many respects more important than the outbound. learning is a two way street, but the community is of course smarter than i could ever hope to be.
There are many ways to read data, but to me it’s all about sample size and profiling. Or to put it another way -there are more jeans than pinstripes suits in any given companies, so the audience for developpers will always be larger than those spending IT budgets.
Hey, what a lot of fun! I thought I was massively popular until I remembered how many Jon Collinses there are out there (and one’s a horse)