Jonathan Schull is a biological psychologist with a longstanding interest in adaptive systems, evolutionary psychology and the spread of information through intelligent networks. In his blog, Dr. Schull has posted a great array of visualizations of Blogspace. As he explains: "Stepan from Blogtree kindly provided me with a bunch of data from his BlogTree.com, blog genealogy site. Each registered blog owner records the pre-existing blogs that inspired their own blog. I used python to crunch the data and re-cast for graphviz. Graphviz lays the graphs out and renders them".In the first graph lines radiate from inspirer to "inspiree", with an arbitrary blog chosen as the very center; while on the second image Dr. Schull placed Dave Winer's Scripting News blog in the center and scaled the fonts so that the area subtended by a character is in logarithmic proportion to the number of descendants.
As the author recognizes, the images are "very evocative of one of the great phenomena (the proliferation of memes) but they don't really allow you to read the history". For further distillation on these images go to the provided URL.
