This isn't directly related to your post, but i have been wanting to ask someone about this for a while, and maybe you can help me:

Is there any way I can do a particular search on a major search engine and get results that are ordered according to their "closeness" to certain website?

I hope I phrased that clearly enough.

In Google, you can use the 'related:' modifier: http://www.google.com/search?q=related:hublog.hubmed.org/

Is that what you mean?

Hi, how did you get the relatedness information? if i'm not wrong it is not in the API. do you scrape the html?

can you share the code? I was interested in scraping (obtaining) the information about who subscribes to who on del.icio.us, in order to build the "social network".

Thanks!

I was just scraping the page for each tag, with a simple Perl regexp. I can do a TouchGraph for the 'social network', if you like...

I would like to make a search for a term like "Photos", "Programming" or "Voodoo" and have the results restricted or ordered by the related modifier.

I would like to get a page about Voodoo that is somehow close to hublog.hubmed.org

Was that a scary example?

Ivan: the closest thing I can think of is a kind of 'search my blogroll', where you give it a list of sites that you want to search (say your subscription list) and run a search limited to those sites.

There's one example here: http://erikbenson.com/code/search-my-blogroll.cgi and Feedster also allows you to limit your search to sites in your blogroll (which you provide in OPML format): http://www.feedster.com/advanced.php

I guess it would be fairly easy to run a 'related:' search on Google and then run another keyword search restricted to those sites.

Alf,

I have been planning to do some similar work in blogosphere. The idea is to graph connected blogs based on their linking to each other. This will make it very easy to completely follow a discussion on a specific topic and get a feel of how people reacted to a blog post.

I guess the APIs that Technorati provides will be enough and no scraping will be required. But I liked the rendering engine that you have used. Can you share your code?

Manas, it's just TouchGraph from http://sourceforge.net/projects/touchgraph/

Manas, they've already done that for livejournal: http://www.touchgraph.com/TG_LJ_Browser.html

Is it possible to get the source of the tag script and the inbox script? That way i could run it on my own server.

Tnx in advance.

The LiveJournal browser doesn't connect blogs based on their linking to each other, though: it connects users by their friendship lists.

A Technorati TouchGraph - http://hublog.hubmed.org/archives/001031.html - is more like what Manas is talking about.

Well, seems I'm not the only one who thinks it's interesting...

You are listed in the Absolutely Del.icio.us Tools Collection.
http://pchere.blogspot.com/2005/02/absolutely-delicious-complete-tool.html

Any interest in open sourcing this?

The TouchGraph code isn't mine to open source (see http://www.touchgraph.com ), but the GraphLayout code is here: http://touchgraph.sourceforge.net/ (see also Manas' comment earlier on).

Great Work!

But where have you found the nice looking layout for the graph?

The code you have linked to on sourceforge hasn´t got this nice looking colors (grey for edges / light red for edges conected to selected node / transparent node labels).
The layout on sourceforge looks really basic. There seem to be another version of the layout around, as i´ve seen layouts similar to yours and the Google Browser everywhere, but unfortuntately I just don´t find it.

Could you please point me towards, where i can also get this fine layout?
Or what you have done to get this layout?

greetings
Andreas

If you want to use the TouchGraph applet in your own project, contact info@touchgraph.com

Have a look at http://prefuse.sourceforge.net too, which is a similar Java-based graphing tool.

Thanks for your answwer. I already wrote Alex from Touchgraph for the layout, but he didn´t answered unfortunately.

I already had a look at prefuse a couple of days ago. It´s really quite nice.

But i guess i´ll stick to Touchgraph, as it has everything in need in the first place.

It´s looking quite nice with mine, too, now.

Only thing i don´t know is, how to add the green info buttons and the transparent effect of the nodes.

So if anyobdy knows anything on that ;-)

greetings
Andreas

Be kind to those who are weaker or unfortunate.