On visualisations of website traffic…
Thursday, January 25, 2007I’m looking for some tools which would enable me to create visual representations of websites – a little like this one of minor9th.com, made with htmlgraph, but where each node represents a page within the site, and where it’s also possible to attach visitor numbers to the pages in question and display the nodes proportionally.
I was also thinking along the lines of relative-size world maps (which are fascinating in themselves), but applying the principle to sitemaps.
Does anyone know any tools out there which do something along these lines already?
I’d bet that almost any similar system would have Graphviz as its foundation. I played about with the OS X port of graphviz when I trying to build up maps of relationships of users on flickr and last.fm. The graphviz syntax isn’t terribly difficult to get your head round though I found the rendering times seem to be exponential to the nodes / links between nodes.I’ll be keen to hear if you find anything off the shelf!
wrightyJanuary 25th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
Ta Paul – I’ll have a look into that shortly.
SimonVic has kindly pointed me towards subject heat map at the Guardian as a pretty clear indication of popularity (though that link only seems to work sporadically – try Ben Hammersley’s blog for more info)
January 25th, 2007 at 3:23 pm