One of the most useful, if not obnoxious, social networking tools on the internet is the mailing list. Through these we get helpful technical support, free stuff people are looking to get rid of, information on the whereabouts of old classmates, and of course massive quantities of spam. What's interesting about all of these is that certain people are much more vocal or noticeable than others. Either they're involved in almost every thread that pops up, or they're just obnoxiously vocal. Whichever one, you're bound to notice and recognize them above most other participants and lurkers in the list.
What Weskamp has done is to map several mailing list that he has encountered. He has written a program that visually represents each member of the list and how many posts they have made, with whom they have interacted, and which threads they have been involved in. The result is that each mailing list creates unique patterns. You start to pick out which lists are moderated, who is the driving force on the list, and what kind of subjects are being discussed without having to filter through hundreds ore even thousands of e-mails.
Overall I find the piece to be fairly successful. While most lists have online archives, it is really difficult to know how active or useful a mailing list is to you without extensive digging. Weskamp's work succeeds spectacularly at being somewhat useful to a user, as well as being thought provoking and interesting. Looking at one map in a single view may not be so interesting, but the dynamic aspect of the piece brings out its strengths. By allowing the user to browse through various lists and explore the information in several different views he is providing the user a more complete and intriguing perspective to the behavior of mailing lists.
No comments:
Post a Comment