I don’t get Mind Maps. Really. I’ve worked with peo­ple who used them all the time. I know sev­eral folks who draw them in real-​​time, while they’re brain­storm­ing, as a way of con­nect­ing things and spit­ting out an… well, an out­line. There a innu­mer­able books and guides and work­shops and soft­ware pack­ages. Sliced bread’s pop­u­lar­ity seems to be wan­ing in the light of the advanc­ing Mind Map Revolution.

And I look at the results, and I see: A rooted tree. An out­line. A strict hier­ar­chy. A homo­ge­neous clas­si­fi­ca­tion dia­gram. A bun­dle of undif­fer­en­ti­ated hard con­straints. A sim­ple Venn Dia­gram made dif­fi­cult and mis­lead­ing by the addi­tion of geo­graph­i­cal information.

Me, I even find acyclic directed graphs uncom­fort­ably con­strain­ing, let alone trees. Me, I’ve spent 20 years [crap!? old now!] doo­dling fuzzy directed hyper­graph visu­al­iza­tion tech­niques (A fuzzy graph is a math­e­mat­i­cal object in which the “attached­ness” of nodes is qual­i­ta­tive. A hyper­graph is a math­e­mat­i­cal object, like a graph, but where sets of nodes are con­nected to sets of nodes — not sin­gle nodes to sin­gle nodes — or pos­si­bly nodes are con­nected by sets of edges to one another. Or both…), and I use some of those tech­niques in my more detailed pro­fes­sional work. Admit­tedly I can’t show them to you, because they’re too dense. But they’re bet­ter for me than Mind Maps.

And they say I’m a visual thinker. Just not a pla­nar one, I spose.

So if you’re going to com­mu­ni­cate some­thing to me that wants to be described by a Venn Dia­gram, then sketch an out­line with a root at the top and the sub-​​nodes indented, and use your face and your hands and your spo­ken and writ­ten words to explain it to me.

But if you want to describe any­thing where you’d have the word “also” in the descrip­tion, then fer­chris­sakes take the time to con­nect every thing as needed — in a web — with all the qualia and onto­log­i­cal assump­tions spelled out right there on the nodes and edges.

Besides, they look like the Shad­ows invented them. Not that there’s any­thing wrong with that. I always sided with the Shad­ows, any­way. Frickin’ nosey Vorlons.…

The same week that Pfizer announced the clo­sure of its research facil­ity here, and the loss of 2000+ jobs from Ann Arbor, Bar­bara (read­ing the paper just the other side of the room) points out that there’s a quarter-​​page of Schering-​​Plough job ads in the Sun­day paper. Of course we don’t know for sure if they were there last week­end as well.

Doubt it.

Most blog­gers main­tain a blogroll of feeds they read regularly.

I sus­pect there’s a ten­dency to load up quickly on feeds related to one another, and then shift to a com­fort­able steady state in which few if any feeds are added or removed. I can see how this dynamic might tend to crys­tal­lize local net­works of blog­gers, linked to one another, very soon after they arrive on the scene. At the same time, the gen­eral insu­lar­ity and iner­tia of blogrolls might act as a bar­rier to entry to use­ful new voices, who oth­er­wise would be a great fit in the com­mu­nity. Track­backs from new blog­gers to estab­lished ones serve to some extent to erode this bar­rier, but track­backs don’t prop­a­gate, and they also need to over­come the linked-​​to blogger’s lim­ited attention.

John Hol­land would say some­thing smart here about the trade-​​offs between explo­ration (adding new and bet­ter links) and exploita­tion (build­ing ongo­ing con­ver­sa­tions). I’m wor­ried that exploita­tion is inbuilt in the socio-​​technical system.

So here’s an idea for a ser­vice, whether it be a web­site or a plugin.

Take my blogroll. Now spi­der each site, and com­pile a data­base of the blogrolls of all the sites thereon. Fil­ter out all entries that already appear on my blogroll.

Sound like a refer­ral ser­vice so far? Not quite.…

First, I don’t want to cinch my lit­tle echo cham­ber tighter. So: Sort the data­base by the num­ber of inbound links, and remove the top quar­tile. In other words, remove the most–linked-​​to blogs.

Sec­ond, I’m sure there’s a wide range of spe­cial inter­ests I don’t share; I don’t knit, I don’t pray, I have no cat; I do read 19^th-​​century mag­a­zines, I do care about auto­mated mechan­i­cal design, and I long to under­stand Text­Mate enough to make it the basis of my lap­top user expe­ri­ence… so let’s avoid the rarest of the rare. Very few care about all my quirks, and vice versa. Throw out the least-​​linked-​​to quar­tile, as well.

Call the remain­ing blogs the “penum­bra” of my blogroll: Sites that have caught the atten­tion of a few peo­ple on my blogroll, but not just one, and which I have not yet seen. The Goldilocks fraction.

And, think­ing I should explore a bit more and exploit a bit less, I want to go see those sites. Hear what they have to say. And then maybe I’ll add them to my blogroll, and thus bump up their centrality.

If link-​​counting doesn’t work as expected, here’s one notion that might help: Give each data­base entry — each blog in the com­piled list — a score cal­cu­lated on the basis of a Tech­no­rati rank­ing. So big blogs and eeny weeny blogs link­ing to feeds would dis­ap­pear, leav­ing the Long Tail mid­dle to have its say.

I would like that. No time now. Make it work as a plu­gin in Word­Press, or make it a site I can send an OPML file to, and we’ll all benefit.

Sit­ting here in the recliner, drink­ing my req­ui­site morn­ing liter of Lime Diet Coke (yeah, I know, bad for me), catch­ing up on blogs via Shrook, plan­ning out the boxes of stuff I need to pho­to­graph later today to sell on eBay, and the NPR sta­tion is talk­ing about the pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates that are now so pro­lif­i­cally plop­ping out of the ass of the American-​​lack-​​of-​​consensus.

And I hear the com­men­ta­tors talk­ing about the lat­est offer­ings’ wor­ries about col­lectibil­ity. “He’s going to need to work on his col­lectibil­ity, if he’s going to have any chance in the run-​​off elec­tion season.”

As my atten­tion was yanked from my lap­top to the radio by these arcane admon­ish­ments, I thought for a sec­ond about how that might work. Col­lectible trad­ing card games? Is there an online mar­ket­place? Is it those pin-​​back but­tons? We just came across a Nixon but­ton in my mother in law’s basement.

And then I turned off the radio, and went back to plan­ning eBay auc­tions.