Digg’s Displays
Have you seen what Digg Labs are doing with the stories you digg on that social bookmarking service? Seeing is the operative word, because they’re experimenting with a number of ways — four, in fact — to display the weight of stories graphically, and they’re a little wild.
From their main page:
Digg Arc displays stories, topics, and containers wrapped around a sphere. Arcs trail users as they digg stories across topics. Stories with more diggs make thicker arcs.
Digg BigSpy places stories at the top of the screen as they are dugg. As new stories are dugg, older stories move down the list. Bigger stories have more diggs.
Digg Stack shows diggs occurring 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.
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.
It’s interesting to think about how legal information or judgments or citation relations might be displayed in this sort of way. Granted, texts and treatises are the best way of capturing the legal “forests” that can be made up of the all the legal “trees” with which we normally concern ourselves; but we might see patterns more readily or see them shifting earlier if we could display legal information graphically.
And speaking of Digg and legal information, don’t forget you can now “digg” any of our posts by using the link “Add to a bookmark service” after each entry on Slaw.
Comments are closed.