del.icio.us.discover is a very sweet-looking dataset visualization project created by Ian "kiddphunk" Timourian, a visual artist from San Francisco. The purpose of the project, according to kiddphunk, is to graph the web's "linkspaces." Basically, he tracks links on del.icio.us based on how popular they are in the del.icio.us community at large and how interesting he personally finds them. Kiddphunk's project compares the activity and interest of multiple users, graphs the differences and siliarities, then creates a visual representation of the results.
This project — half art and half social commentary — is all the result of some very high-level thinking about how we interact with the web and how we fit into the web-based communities to which we belong. Some of the theory is a little abstract, but one thing is for sure: del.icio.us.discover sure creates some beautiful pictures.
