Axis change

There is a very simple trick that, while obvious once you know it is something that may not be obvious at first.

Many reports, not just from web analytics products look like this:

Click to enlarge.

In this case we are looking at a 'Most Frequent Referrers' report, with a classic bar chart. Don't worry about the data (it happens to be from this site), what I want you to pay attention to is the chart and how pointless it is.

Read more...

Link Visualisation

I have been having a thought - something to do with visualising the relationships between sites/blogs/posts/pages.

Clearly others have gone before me, I rather like:

http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html, http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/ and http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html for various reasons.

None of these quite do the job that I need - so if I'm going to create something myself I need some:

• network visualisation, including some de-cluttering algorithms
• site indexer (perhaps using web analytics data)
• source of link information for links going in the other direction

To be fancy this could all be done in 3D, but I'm not sure it would be any more useful than something in 2D.

And then I'll become fabulously rich.