Idea: Visualize wikipedia trails
A browser extension that watches you surf through Wikipedia, and then generates a pretty graph with some kind of representation for how long you spent on each page.
On the other hand, maybe not, because I’m not sure I really want to know where that time just went. It would be a pretty branching tree, though. I should know better than to click through links to Wikipedia — it really doesn’t matter where the link goes. They’re all dangerous. Howstuffworks, too. And if any of the Wikipedia articles link TO Howstuffworks (or visa versa) then it really is hopeless.
And THEN, you get a LOT of people to install it (or Wikipedia to run it on their access logs) and let people surf through the trees starting from some arbitrary page. That would be cool.
July 27th, 2009 at 10:59 am
Hi Ken,
Did you ever get around to expanding on this? I had a very similar idea, but that would actually run as a bot, so I give it a page, it returns a list of links to other pages, represents that as a directed graph, does the same for each returned page, up to a specified number of iterations.
Knowing that there is likely to be software out there for building the graphs themselves, this doesn’t even appear to be a difficult project.
Cool idea though? It came to me when I found I needed to bookmark a number of linked pages – but that really the links themselves were as valuable as the pages (i.e. where I was coming from was as useful information as where I was).
July 28th, 2009 at 11:08 am
Alas, I got distracted with other stuff. It would be a much easier to generate something interesting with access to Wikipedia access logs since then you skip the whole “opt in”.
I’m much more interested in the actual paths people take rather than the directed graph of possible links.