An interesting way to think about how people will search for information is how words are connected to other words in meaning and in use. A graphic representation of this is found in a Google product called wonder wheel. It is just one example of this trend but for me it was the first opportunity to see the graphic concept up close.
I was doing some keyword research for the 16 Fox Television Stations about a year ago when one of our station web producers told me about how he was doing research for keywords related to weather. He had just come across the Google wonder wheel concept.
This visual connection from one word and concept to the next helped me see some of the opportunities to improve our coverage and our search potential. You can see this same visual concept showing up elsewhere on the web, for example, at the visual thesaurus.
It’s not unlike the prezi presentation concept. Some of the students used this zooming presentation editor in the Howard Rheingold social media class at Stanford that I just finished. It helped to inspire some very wide ranging and impressive discussions because unlike a power point, it allowed for one to see the big picture while diving into details and various media. It looks like a lot of work but we were visited by the man behind the prezi company in Howard’s classroom and with the assistance of a partner who twittered the discussion, he was able to build multi-media presentations of the class room conversations in real time.
All of this in many ways goes back to the concept of mindmapping, which is about building the connections between ideas, something you can do on a piece of paper but is given full flight by on line applications.
A journalistic application of these ideas is found in muckety. I saw that company present at the Online News Association meeting in San Francisco and was amazed at how complete (and complex) some of their mapping of influence and power were.
With the emergence of 3-d media, one can imagine the day when we’ll have constellations of words and concepts floating before our eyes and like a science fiction movie, will be able to move among them and dive deeper. That will be truly immersive search.
If you have other mapping, visual connection software, please let us know.
