From now on, 3D-Scape will announce when new versions of products are ready for download here (like the TopicCrunch announcement below).  You can subscribe to the RSS feed, of course, but an alternative way that avoids seeing my other posts (about visualization, general computer problem solutions and so on) is to use Google Alerts. 

1. Go to http://www.google.com/alerts 
2. Enter, for example, TopicCrunch and Topicscape,  
3. give your email address,
4. choose Type “blog” and a frequency. 

Then when we make an announcement about the products here, Google will send you an email with a link to it.  Couldn’t be easier.   Oh, and don’t forget to allow emails from google.com to go through your spam filter or you may not see them.

Yesterday (Jan. 11th ‘07) Yahoo changed the format of their search engine results page (SERP), so TopicCrunch was reporting “nf” (not found) for all Yahoo searches.  This has now been adjusted and there’s a new version of TopicCrunch on-line for download.  All users can just install that on top of their existing copy and the license will be picked up automatically.  If you uninstall TopicCrunch first, you may have to get your license from the original email and install it again.  30-day free trial users can install it too, but sorry, it won’t extend the trial period.

TopicCrunch is a very useful tool for anyone who wants to do really deep web searches without having to spend hours wading through pages of results.

In addition, it is a web searching tool that’s useful for both marketers and SEO practitioners.  For a given set of search phrases or keywords…

• It can give you a list of domains of companies in your area of business.
• It allows you to see the position of your own website on the three principal search engines.
• It also lets you keep a watch on your competitors’ position.

Our policy is to issue an amended version whenever the search engines make a format change like this.

You can find more information about TopicCrunch on its main pages.   

The Mindmaps Directory continues to grow.  I just did an update and it now has 600 thumbnails and links to examples of mindmaps, concept maps and other visualization techniques, all over the web.  All categorized by map type and tagged.

One a smilar, but more static, theme to the images arising out of drawing all airline flights in the USA, is this fascinating finding.  If you draw lines on the map that connect all the zip codes in the USA in numerical order, a pattern emerges. 

http://eagereyes.org/Applications/ZIPScribbleMap.html

It has been a good day for visualization.  http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html has to be the best summary of graphic methods for representing data, information and concepts I’ve ever seen.  Probably the best there’s ever been in one web page.  Now all we need is to get a Topicscape in there.  Trouble is Topicscape would span across the Information Visualization, Concept Visualization, and Strategy Visualization areas on this ‘Periodic Table’ of graphical elements.

The new version (now coming to the end of its Beta period) of Topicscape allows you to save a page like that as an MHT file and have it running totally off line with all scripts working.  (IE7 can save it but has to get a lot of the data on-line).

As you can guess from my association with Topicscape, I love information visualization and think it offers unique help when we try to understand data.  A good example I just came across is at http://users.design.ucla.edu/~akoblin/work/faa/index.html.  Aaron Koblin, the designer, has his main site at aaronkoblin.com.