Sand Atom Browser Concept(update)

 

http://scobleizer.com/2010/03/27/the-seven-needs-of-real-time-curators/

Robert Scoble has an interesting post on content curation and the tools needed to allow users to more easily package stuff both in real time and in a meaningful way. It inspired me to think about how one could visualize relationships between content atoms(see Roberts link above). At the risk of stretching Robert's chemistry analogy, you could consider bonds between various content atoms to exist at different energy levels, with tweets being more real time or at higher energy levels vs blog posts at lower energy levels, not nearly as timely. 

The browser depicted above would visualize content atoms and molecules and the relationships between them in real time. The colored blocks represent different atoms, each of which would receive a share of web crawler time which helps to determine the attraction and placement relative to other blocks. The bonds formed are based on location, time, and subject, along with direct user drag and drop.

Update on Tuesday, September 21, 2010 at 1:57PM by Anthony Blow

DataSift could provide a powerful, living data stream into something like the Sand browser. The linked video interview by Mr. Scoble with Nick Halstead, founder @DataSift.net is really interesting.

I'd love to someday use Kinect(if Microsoft does the right thing and rolls it into Windows) motion capture of my hands and fingers, to visually mold the filter parameters going into Datasift. The output visual feedback from Sand would change in real time as liquid connections are made and broken between the constantly evolving thoughts and activities of others out there. Adjacent atoms in the display might side apart, as attention cools to black on a given subject, only to become attracted to other neighboring subject atoms associated with the next wrinkle in newsflow, stoking them red hot.