Mike Love, a fellow writer (and one of the newest members) at Smartmobs.com has come up with an interesting way to use Wikipedia to create a Genealogy of Influence map using Google TouchGraph browser.

I had no idea that Mike Love was a programmer - this is great!   I mean, I’d love to see something like this applied in a couple of different ways.

1 - I’d like to be able to put in any person or search term and see the touchgraph of relationships in the same way it’s shown above.   Something like this, were in a search engine - could greatly improve search.

2- I’d like to see visitor segmentation in Web Analytics viewed this way (perhaps Visual Sciences already does this …I’ll have to check with Eric Peterson when I get ot the Emetrics Summit in two weeks).

While it’s mainly an informational project now - I think Mike Love has touched onto something much bigger - probably beyond what he can do with it - but search engines ought to take this approach and run with it.  I know Kartoo tries to do this, but a Kartoo map is not the same thing as what Mike Love did.

For one thing, Kartoo’s map is based on website and then ideas; I’m more interested in the relationship of people and ideas, not so much websites.  See what I mean. 

The technology exists to do what I’m talking about - it just takes vision - insight.