Dark sky was a great example of embedded dataviz in an everyday app. I really liked how the article presents use cases and links them to information to present, a good reference to help junior UX and other team members understand UI/UX use case articulation.

Interesting serialization format

Like any other map, The Internet map is a scheme displaying objects’ relative position; but unlike real maps (e.g. the map of the Earth) or virtual maps (e.g. the map of Mordor), the objects shown on it are not aligned on a surface. Mathematically speaking, The Internet map is a bi-dimensional presentation of links between websites on the Internet. Every site is a circle on the map, and its size is determined by website traffic, the larger the amount of traffic, the bigger the circle. Users’ switching between websites forms links, and the stronger the link, the closer the websites tend to arrange themselves to each other.

In plain English, this service looks at which websites link to a particular target website, and then it ranks websites that are popular among those linking websites using a method commonly used in recommendation algorithms.

In technical jargon, it reinterprets the incident edges in the adjacency matrix as sparse high dimensional vector, and uses cosine similarity to find the nearest neighbors nodes within this feature-space.

This is a write-up about an experiment from a few months ago, in how to find websites that are similar to each other. Website similarity is useful for many things, including discovering new websites to crawl, as well as suggesting similar websites in the Marginalia Search random exploration mode.