serial consign

Of all the social media making waves at the moment, I still contend that social bookmarking is the most interesting. I love the idea of organization emerging through the idiosyncrasies of multiple collaborators. Beyond that, participating in social bookmarking forces users to confront their personal logic (or lack thereof) in categorizing and managing a body of information. I just learned about a really fantastic application that can be used to map and navigate a del.icio.us database. This project, called 6pli is not the first visualization to capitalize on del.icio.us data, but it is the most intuitive and dynamic that I have seen yet.

The image above is a 6pli visualization of the bookmarked links and bundles (tag categories) in orbit around a link to transmediale.de. You can see quite clearly the network of associated links (ars electronica, intelligent agent magazine, c-base reconstruction project, etc.) that form a constellation that is driven by the use of similar tags (berlin, architecture, sound, etc.). There are a number of potential configurations for a 6pli visualization and they can be manipulated and navigated on screen. So in the example above I could centre the display around the tag festival, then the link for todaysart festival, then the tag for music, then the link to the midi skirt project, and so on. The ability to spatialize this information, move through it, and interact with it is extremely compelling; I think I've spent about three hours this week exploring my links with 6pli.

6pli is still alpha testing but if you are interested in taking this application for a test drive, check out 6pli.com/serial_consign. Beyond that you can contact the developer of the program, software artist Santiago Ortiz, through the project site to get access to 6pli (provided you have a del.icio.us account). Santiago's personal site is also worth looking at as he has an impressive portfolio of work which includes Hipercontrol^3, another project exploring the networks created through social bookmarking.

[via architectradure]