A "weather map" of the Blogosphere "Hurricane"

In September 2004 I was being overwhelmed by the emergent behavior of the Omidyar Network which was just getting off the ground. In this post on the ONet, I pleaded for a way to SEE the order emerging from the Net as it progressed on its path.

"A 2 screen visualization one for GIS and the other for Topic maps would provide potential for geobrowsing and display of complex information with geolocation metadata, and topic maps could provide a non-geographical visualization concurrently. Seing both at once either for interactive access or passive display would be very powerful. If there is a desire to avoid imposing ontological order on the network content, visualizations like these could provide a 'weather map' of where this hurricane is headed. The opportunity to SEE order emerging from complexity would provide us a truly unique way of understanding O.net." Click below to see the original post on ONet.

Comment by dave davison

This ability to SEE ties in with Manuel Lima's beautiful MeshForum presentation and his visualizing complexity website and with Shel Israels' post on the difficulty of visualizing "avenues of influence" on the blogosphere.

At this moment I am concerned about going "live" in the blogosphere without having a visual map with which to both simulate and actively follow the emergent properties of my own journey into this unknown territory. The fear is to trigger unintended consequences of putting the blog into syndication. Maybe I am just being overly cautious and should just "let it roll" as my friend Tom Munnecke does on ONet. Dee Hock would call this process chaordic. I call it
free fall.