The question refers to ways of making a set of sitemaps showing who has linked to whom, with an underlying intention of identifying one or more starting points for a journey of discovery.
That sentence is sufficiently dense as to require further explanation. Are you ready?
Let’s say that we want to find a Birmingham blogroll that starts by listing all of the active blogs with a community focus. That starting point might be Jon Bounds sidebar at BiNS (which still has an outdated link to my defunct site, BTW. As does CiB), or Andy Pryke’s earlier list. (You may note that Andy links to something called BlogChalk, which has some correspondence to what I’m looking for. The page he links to seems to have changed, so I’ve gone here instead.)
From that list, I’d like to see a map showing which blogs have linked to each other in a consistent way. A map can be a sitemap, which is a hierarchical tree of connected resources. But I would prefer an interactive spider map that provided a visual route to follow, and some sort of category information as a guide.
6pli do something of the sort that’s based on del.icio.us tags, so perhaps I could copy a bunch of brum links into it and generate this sort of thing. Ultimately, I’d like to see a search engine that takes a placename (Birmingham) and a category (social media) and provides an interactive diagram as a result, whose core is defined by prevalence of the second search term, and whose connected nodes are defined by hyperlinks on the target site.
A thing like that would function as a Thinkbase or collaborative association of place-based websites, a map of the local blogosphere. Most importantly it would provide an instant guide for people elsewhere. Suppose I was from Newcastle and wanted to know if there was anything like the Ouseburn community in the West Midlands. I might search on keywords like festival, artist cooperative, or social enterprise, then follow the interlinked nodes on the map, picking and choosing until I found something I liked. Within minutes I would have an idea of the social landscape, who connects with who, what links are most productive and so forth.
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