BigShinyThing

Using some tools more usually applied to social network analysis, and with which our resident geeks have been studying the spread of news in networks of blogs, we’ve created a topic map which shows the whole year’s main themes at a glance.

Click on the image to download a much more readable PDF version of our big picture of 2005.

It works like this:

• All major topics/keywords for our stories over the last year are represented by circles.
• Lines join topics which have appeared together in the same story, so you can see how the various threads we’ve been following join up.
• The width of the lines relates to the frequency with which the topics they join have cropped up together in stories.
• Topics which relate closely are closer together in the map.
• The size of the circles representing the topics indicates roughly how ‘key’ those topics are to the year as a whole — the bigger the circle, the more radically different the look of the whole picture would be if that topic hadn’t cropped up.
• Finally, the colours represent, in broad terms, how the various topics cluster into inter-related factions of related ideas.

Whew! That’s a lot of information. Respect to Tufte for inspiration.

Draw your own conclusions — we’re kind of surprised, actually, that ‘Apple’ is closely followed by ‘3G’ as key topics of the year: maybe a sign of things to come! We’re less surprised that ‘blogging’ shows up as important. Likewise ‘advertising’, God bless its tenacious little soul.