I discovered a company called TouchGraph today, which as far as I can work out is in the United States. Their founding CEO is Alex Shapiro who created the original visual browser for Google! TouchGraph specialise in visualisation software, hence my interest. They say their focus is on “ creating tools that enable decision makers to display, navigate, and analyze complex data simply and intuitively”. I decided to play around with their free products , which can map links in Google, Amazon and FaceBook. This visualisation maps my url - http://www.durantlaw.info/ - on Google. It is the initial visualisation.

Apparently the underlying algorithm maps similar pages. Similar pages do not directly represent inbound or outbound hyperlinks, but rather pages with similar content. Note some nodes have a circle around them with a series of links from them. The central node, or halo as TouchGraph calls it, serves to cluster like with like. The red cluster in the centre is my site. The blue cluster to the north is Stan Garfield’s knowledge management website . The dark-green cluster to the west is Dave Snowden’s Cognitive Edge and the adjacent and linked site is actKM . The cluster adjacent and linked to actKM is the Singapore Information and Knowledge Management Society . Now consider the next map, which looks a bit like an Ishihara test for colour-blindness!

In this map I have expanded the nodes. There is a limit in that only 30 similar pages per node can be shown. I found it interesting! My site is the red cluster slightly north of centre. What is not apparent from the screen capture is almost every cluster is now linked. The exceptions are the yellow, purple and red clusters to the north-west. Now remember the algorithm is mapping similar pages, not linked pages. The colouring, clustering and linkages merely show greater likeness.

Now to give some context; in a business sense the yellow, purple and red clusters to the north-west are sufficiently the same to be captured by Google, but are different enough to not be mapped to the main body. This is the potential strength of the tool – the ability to discover differentiation. Out of curiosity I mapped the HolisTech website as well as a couple of competitors. The results were fascinating, and at least give me an idea of how our web site stacks up against others.

I also mapped in terms like ‘knowledge management’, ‘narrative’, and ‘network analysis’. These results were also fascinating. A few people who are thought to be gurus, have websites that under-perform or don’t differentiate them much from others.

If you are interested in how your website is similar or differentiated from others give TouchGraph a try. If you want to see how terms relate to each other give it a try also. In either case you will quickly see that networks matter.

Regards, Graham