In the context of my Hypergraph project, I have been asked whether Hypergraph can be used to show the tags of Wordpress blogs.
To be honest, I don’t think that this would be a good idea. On this page I use the Cumulus plugin by Roy Tanck. This plugin does a good job in visualizing the tags in your blog by distributing the tags on a 3D sphere. It’s easy to use, easy to understand – so if you are looking for some appealing visualisation of your tags, use this plugin and you’re done.
But why don’t I write a wordpress plugin for Hypergraph? First of all I currently don’t have the time 
. But apart of that, I don’t think it’s fit for purpose. Hypergraph, like other tools that show trees/graphs using hyperbolic geometry, is strong when there is some exponentially growing graph structure in the background. For example the organisational structure of a company or a class hierarchy are suitable.
However, this is not the case for blogs: tags are used to loosely group blog entries which are somehow related, but even if we enforce a graph structure based on tags (which I don’t really propose), it won’t work. Of course one could link all entries with the same tag(s). Of course I haven’t conducted something like a field study to analyse a significant amount of blogs in the wild, but I assume that this will just create a lot of clutter, but won’t give additional meaning. Plugins like the mentioned Cumulus plugin circumvent this problem: they show the tags and not the articles, hence reducing the number of entities to show. They also don’t link the tags – even thought this would be some interesting challenge.
This leaves us with two open questions: Is it possible to cluster tags such that some similarity of tags can be established? If this can be done, would this give benefit to the visitor of a blog or another site?
Ideas and comments are of course most welcome.
Tags: Programming, Visualization, Web