Interactive Visualization of blog searches

Abstract

This report describes the project Interactive Visualization of Blog Searches from research and concept creation to the final implementation results. The purpose of this project was to develop a visual interface for browsing search results from the Twingly blog search engine which intends to simplify the users screening process and encourage browsing. The methods used to develop and implement the search interface and the two final results, the concept and the implementation, are presented in this report. The concept is an ideal description of the proposed functionality and components of the blog search interface developed during the initial phase of this project. Three different concepts were developed and one was chosen for further development, all three concepts are presented. The final concept which was chosen for implementation is an augmented version of an existing interface originally used for presenting album covers in Apple’s application iTunes. The implementation is the realization of the concept and was implemented as a Flash application using the programming language ActionScript 3 and the 3D engine Papervision. The final application implements most of the functionality and graphical content described in the concept but unfortunately suffers from a low frame rate. The main reasons for this low frame rate and proposed improvements to the implementation are discussed at the end of the report.