This morning Gavin Heaton shared a little neat online tool with us on Twitter, called TouchGraph. In a blog post Gavin wonders if this is the tool that’ll allow you to calculate someone’s sphere of influence, which reminded me of this graph made by David Armano.
The whole thinking around influence interests me probably more than anything else, so I had to check it out. Here’s the graph for this blog:
First thought, it looks like a pretty neat application and I haven’t done testing it to be sure what exactly the benefits might be. It doesn’t look like the graphs your sphere of influence though. It sort of maps all kinds of links it can find for this url (it can do keywords as well by the way). On a personal level you see links to LinkedIn, my Blogger account, my other blog, … and as far as Kinepolis (which was my old employer). On a ‘content’ level you see links to a cluster around Sonic Youth, which is probably because the name of this blog refers to a Sonic Youth song. And then there are some more random links really only relate to some of the wordings on this blog.
So for now, a lot of random links mapped around a url or keyword if you ask me, but nevertheless pretty interesting to check out a bit more.
'Cross The Breeze 
It’s a visualisation of the the “related:http://crossthebreeze.com” query at Google… , http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=related%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fcrossthebreeze.com&btnG=Google+Search
A rudimentary form of Touchgraph has been available in open source for some years now, but the guys behind it have polished it up and started to commercialize it as a visualisation tool for all kinds of “graphs” (= things that are connected, the visualisation shows the “strength” of the connection).
interesting indeed!
I guess one of the things that I liked about this was the way it provides a map of the influence that you have across the open and closed networks — from the web to LinkedIn, YouTube etc.
Obviously there is some work still to be done, but it is a great start to what could be a very useful social mapping tool.