Data visualization is all about communication. You can interpret large data sets and communicate those ideas to others quicker with visualizations than you can with a big list and a bunch of columns.
(Not convinced? Check out our slideshow about The Value of 3D Data Visualization.)
Ever since Betty White was picked by the denizens of the Internet to host “Saturday Night Live” (which is happening this Saturday night, by the way), we thought it would be fun to track the meme of Betty White visually and see what it looked like with each URL representing a data point.
Everybody knows the story by now:
A Facebook page was launched in Dec. 2009 by a fan to convince Lorne Michaels to let the 88-year old actress host SNL. By March 11, 2010, after a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Screen Actors Guild, a Super Bowl Snickers commercial, and an ensuing Internet frenzy, the show relented.
This is what it looks like on the Web.
Overall View
The full view is too huge to even put in a blog post. That, and it is full of tons of disconnected URLs just floating all by themselves at the edges of a virtual space.
What we see to the right is a high-level view of most of the URLs that make up the connected portion of the “Betty White Saturday Night Live SNL” universe.
(Click on the picture for a bigger version.)
To help make sense of it all, let’s drilldown and highlight some of the key findings.
Each sphere represents a relevant URL and is scored for average sentiment (green for positive, red for negative, gray for neutral).
A green connecting line between two spheres is interlinked. A red end of a line represents an inbound link, while a blue one represents an outbound link.
Incestuous Cluster
Looking at this closely clustered visualization below, you intuitively get the idea that these URLs are all by themselves, save for one exception. And you’d be right. Each URL in the main cluster is part of the domain http://livefromnewyorkitssaturdaynightlive.blogspot.com/.
What’s happened here is that many of the posts on this SNL fansite link to each other by way of a list of archived posts. Also, a sidebar list of “Upcoming Shows” lists Betty White as the host of the May 8 episode.
The only link outside of the blog is one from New York magazine’s Vulture blog that was referred to in another small post. That’s the neutral URL out on its own with just one inbound link.
So from a linkage standpoint, you could determine that, while there is a lot of content on the “Live From New York, It’s Saturday Night” blog, it doesn’t really get spread outside of its own little grouping.
Lots of Inbound Links
Below, however, is an example of a healthy and influential URL. This is the number-one most influential URL in the “Betty White SNL” insight. It’s the one smack dab in the middle, highlighted green, and it’s the USA Today story from March 11, 2010 that confirmed the fact that White would indeed host the show.
(Click on the image for a bigger version.)
There are 74 sites linking into that URL and many of those sites are gateways that were also linked to by other URLs. That’s why the spider web continues to grow and live outside of this particular URL.
The number of people that could find their way back to the USA Today page is staggering, considering how many sites that link to it also have second-order and third-order connections.
Gateway URL
The last visualization (below–click to enlarge) is what I like to call a gateway URL. The URL, highlighted green and off to the right a little, has 16 inbound links and one outbound link and is this story from the NY Daily News.
It also appears to be off in its own little cluster, but it is positioned in a way where you can clearly see that it is the gateway to all of these other URLs, each with their own significance. In fact, only two of the URLs that link to this URL even lead back to the main hub in any way.
This kind of visual influence mapping can be invaluable to a business, giving you the ability to visually track and measure the reach of a particular message, I hope this post has helped illuminate the value one can get from this tool.
And, by the way, are you looking forward to watching Betty White host SNL as much as we are?
