Category: My original inspiration to monkey with the lizard feeder was a vision of an animated summary of the content as it flowed through. I realized a tiny piece of this in a GreaseMonkey script - install or video.
High speed play-back is neat, and appealing in principle, but largely unusable. Even FriendFeed realtime suffers from some of the same visual glitches as the item you’re reading moves downward. I started to play with a columnar layout thinking that horizontal jumps would be easier than vertical for tracking flowing text blocks.
The word cloud visualization is far from the target, but gotta love a deadline. I’d imagined a deeper understanding of the content, to better drive the messy text normalization, and more expressive typography. The algorithm moves recently repeated items to the top of the list, mixing recency and frequency. A decay function, and some animation niceties, could dramatically improve the aesthetics.
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Andy — really cool stuff! Really like this direction. Thanks for sharing and posting a link via the submission bug.
This is a good idea; I agree with you that some animation on the tagcloud might improve things. I wrote some Javscript functions to do that for a recent project; you’re welcome to borrow and improve any of that stuff.
You’ve got the right idea to mix recency and frequency measures, although it might be nice to display the balance, and let the user modify it on the fly. Visualizing real-time changes like this is a real challenge; there have been a number of really flashy visualizations of activity on Digg, for example, that I think have been more sweetness than substance. But I think you’ve got something useful here.
Thanks Jason! I’d played with FeedVis a while back and am pulling the code to peek around