thecages

I, like everyone else, now get a lot of my news from Digg.
It's a good news service, blah blah blah blah.

They now also have a Labs project which is not nearly as fancy as Google's or Yahoo's but still has two cool toys.

Digg Swarm and Stack are two flash-based apps that visualise Digg activity in near real time.

Digg Swarm draws a circle for stories as they're dugg. Diggers swarm around stories, and make them grow. Brightly colored stories have more diggs.

Digg Stack shows diggs occuring in real time on up to 100 stories at once. Diggers fall from above and stack up on popular stories. Brightly colored stories have more diggs.

Not really revolutionary, but cool.

What I find interesting about Internet Visualisation tools like these is how intuitively *right* what they display feels.
The visualisations appear totally random.

That's the point - they present the ongoing random reality of the internet.
Somewhere there is a pattern in there - a very complex organisation.
Information tends to organise itself.