I have this ongoing fascination with data visualization tools that provide easily navigable visual ‘portals’ into complex data sets, especially as they apply to website navigation. Mostly the interest stems from work, where we face this issue on a macro level (how to organize access to a website that has over 30k pages broken into a huge number of ‘content areas’) and on a micro level as we have one project in particular where we’d really like to have a tool that offers students the ability to navigate complex biology subject matters easily. So, today I ran across Touchgraph, which is completely awesome. You’ll need a java enabled web browser to check it out.

The other reason I’ve been fascinated with these comes from reading Gibson and Sterling and the other cyberpunk authors and recognizing that basically they’re onto something when they describe near future computer interfaces, it’s just a question of what that something ends up looking like, and these tools I’ve been linking to are glimpses….or potential glimpses anyway 😉