Somebody out there on the Lazyweb[tm] do this. Please! Personal mind-marketmaps…
“Random Idea:
- take the access logs from a weblog
- work out how many hits each individual entry gets
- use this to choose a background colour for that entry
Now adapt this process to work in realtime. The more popular stuff (which is likely to be the most interesting) will stick out, less popular stuff will fade into the background, giving attentive visitors an easy way to jump straight to the best content.”
Petafloptimism 
This reminded me of Seth Godin in his new (ish) book “survival is not enough”. He dubs this type of process as “fast feedback loops’ and spends a lot of time pleading for someone out there in the lazyweb to come up with things like “dynamemo”
where users rate email from colleagues and those that weren’t highly rated would drop to the bottom of yr inbox. (er, isn’t that slashdot ?)
He also talks an awful lot about how such real time feedback loops are essential to making supermarkets work where I suspect they really do have databases that change the visual look of the shop in real time according to sales information.
One thing that struck home was his point about how Walmart are “organised to evolve”. How many, Amazon aside, sites are designed with this goal in mind ??
Anyway its a lot better than Permission Marketing.
Hi Matt,
Interesting idea about a weblog-treemap where color would indicate popularity. However, the problem with treemaps (like the marketmap) is that you need a hierarchy in order to make a map that makes sence.
Why not take a low tech approach, I think that a simple frame which shows the current top 10 hottest blog entries might do the trick. As another example of this, I can make what I consider beatifull graphs of weblogs with my TGGoogleBrowser: http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html , but for many purposes simple list, such as ones generated by http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/06/04.html is sufficient (and it takes a lot less coding).
Just an idea, BTW, enjoyed seeing your picture after the preface about you “geeking out”, very funny, keep on bloggin’.
Like Google, this confuses quality with popularity.
Sometimes that’s OK, but to color (both meanings intended) all your information sacrifices everything to the popular view.
That’s why federalism works so well…pure democracy is balanced with expert representatives. The Epinions model uses democracy to increase the expertness, which is clever, but perhaps too much overhead for a blog.
I’ve been wanting to implement a scheme like this on a blog site I’m building for my PhD research… I just haven’t figured out all the bits yet. If anyone else has – I’d love to see it in action!