Andrew Chamberlain is right: the Visual Thesaurus is quite possibly the coolest thing ever. In addition to being a weirdly beautiful and functional thesaurus in the conventional sense, it looks to have enormous potential as a brainstorming aide.
I can think of a few extensions of this form that would at least rival the thesaurus in coolness, however. Imagine if some service like Lexis-Nexis were to build a comparable tool for modelling and navigating interconnected news stories and legal opinions. One could trace the legal concept of, say, "privacy" as it weaves its way through case law and scholarly interpretation... or Monica Lewinski as she erupts into the zeitgeist and evolves from scandal to punchline.
Reason on Facebook
Reason on Twitter
Reason on YouTube
Reason RSS
Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time.
Corey|6.2.03 @ 8:59AM|#
My company has done this for lexis-nexis, see link above.
Plutarck|6.2.03 @ 9:40AM|#
Wow, this is great fun! Thanks for the post; this is a highly neet - and useful - tool. I'm actually considering buying it, of all things ;)
Corey|6.2.03 @ 12:15PM|#
Also check out the google visualization at this link:
http://www.anacubis.com/googledemo/google/index.asp