If I had a tail, it would, I feel, be advisable that I now place it sheepishly between my legs as I tuck into the large portion of humble pie set before me.

On May 10th this year I smugly wrote a blog entitled ‘Google a Gonna?’, delighting in the prospect of another corporate monster meeting its untimely demise. Little did I know …

Google Earth is awesome … the potential applications are seemingly limitless. You can literally (well … virtually) fly all around the earth, zooming in wherever you please, tilting and rotating the landscape to your heart’s content … a more compelling experience is hard to imagine. Terrain, roads, buildings, hotels, restaurants, local search, route finder … already this product has much to offer. Add to this the .KML technology providing layers of dynamic content bound to geographical locations and you have yourself the building blocks of something truly exceptional.

Before hailing Google as an untouchable techno-god, it must be said that this offering is really a re-branding of an already existent application developed over a number of years by the Keyhole team – recently aquired by the search engine giant.

So popular was this free application that Google were forced to suspend downloading and registration just two days after launching in an attempt to combat the massive amount of traffic generated by it’s release. You can still get the download but you’ll have to employ a good search engine to find it!

www.grokker.com is a search engine that displays the results of your information requests in a very interesting way…

In his excellent blog Semiologic, Denis de Bernard’s recent posting claims that Grokking ‘..is times more powerful that anything Google’s pathetically outperformed search engine will let you do. It deserves the blogosphere’s full attention.’

I agree … Grokking may not be perfect but it’s a step in the right (and for me inevitable) direction, away from linear search results toward a more visually compelling and intuituve data representation.

When I looked at the new UK political map at the BBC, I couldn’t help noticing something…

Is it just me, or is there a Dragon in Wales – bowing its head and unfurling its wings? Take another look…

Wales doesn’t usually enter my mind. What could it mean?

The Welsh political map
Looking at the map of Wales itself, it seems that the 4 parties cover roughly the same area of land as each other. The way the parties are symmetrically clustered is interesting:

Both the Liberal Democrats (yellow) and the Conservatives (blue) seem to have 3-fold symmetry around the centrepoint of Wales, while Plaid Cymru (green) and Labour (red) have 2-fold symmetry above and below that centrepoint.

Blaenau Gwent (Labour’s bloody nose) is the small grey-green spot to the south-east. And is that Newtown at the centrepoint?

So what’s new on the horizon for Wales? Is the Welsh Dragon rising?

[Original images created by the BBC, and borrowed with respect.]

Something I’ve just been trying out…

Here is a Category Map of this website. It uses the WordPress Category Map Plugin.

The size and colour of the category names are related to the number of posts in that category. Each category name is also a link and can be used to browse the posts contained within that category.

If you refresh the page, you get a new, randomly generated map.

I think the map gets more interesting when there is a greater number of posts on the site and the relative differences in category size gets more pronounced.

I have posted some comments the plugin’s website, about how the map could be taken further.