My graduate course, Writing for Electronic Communities is currently working its way through Richard Landow’s tome, Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. This is my first time making my way through the third edition (published in 2006). Though it is always nice to go back and visit Storyspace again, I pleased to see Landow discussing some newer, fascinating, and ultimately useful applications. The first of those applications is the TouchGraph Google Browser, which according to TouchGraph’s web site "reveals the network of connectivity between websites, as reported by Google’s database of related sites." In short, you enter a search string and, using a Java applet, the application maps related sites in clusters colored by site similarity. Here is the map of the string "Web 2.0":

You can learn about the web site represented by a particular sphere by clicking on it; information will appear in the upper-left box. Right click on a sphere to open the web site in a new tab.

One of the URLs I happened to open was to a wonderfully useful site I hadn’t heard of: Go2Web2.0. It is essentially as advertised: The Complete Web 2.0 Directory. Web 2.0 applications are listed by logo (which makes it a bit image heavy) and can be sorted according to preset tags. The range of applications is spectacular—and makes me wonder when we are going to reach the point of too much redundancy: