Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Demonstrated at this week's FOWA, the Twingly screensaver is a .NET application that visualises the frequency of blog posts on a 3D globe.

Here's a YouTube video of it at work.



Rather pretty, if pointless!
The current build seems a tad unstable with .NET 3.0. Probably worth waiting a while for a new version...

There's been some turmoil in parts of the blogosphere recently over people trying to find a name for sites like MySpace, FaceBook, Microsoft's Live Spaces and Yahoo 360.

They're obviously not blogs, though they do have some similarities.

So what are they for? They're web pages and sites that have some element of social networking, but they're also places to put details of who you are, what you do, what you like. You can may be add some media, and links to friends and sites you like.

Now, I know I've been around online longer than many bloggers have been alive, but there's one thing I remember back in the days when we were building the first ISPs, and setting up user public web space soon after.

We had an idea, and we had the tools to help build them.

They were web pages that had places to put details of who you were, what you did, what you liked. You could even add some media (once Netscape invented the object tag), and put in links to friends and sites you like. You could even link them into social networks.

Sounds familiar?

We called them "Home Pages".

Maybe it's a term we need to bring back.

I still kind of like it, even if it is a little "Web 0.2"...

A map of LiveJournal interconnections, using citations for 24,000 LJ blogs.

Part of a fascinating blog mapping project. Click here to see a link graph of the set of blogs in general...

Original link via BoingBoing