Once again the metro / subway / underground metaphor to map websites and blogs. Here is the recent (Sept 2008) creation of Claude Aschenbrenner (Serial-Mapper blog), and maps his selection of visual thinkers blogs, in France and abroad. Thank you Claude for including me in such a nice company (between E. Tufte and J. Veronis) !!

by blog name :

by blogger’s name :

The PDF version of the map is interactive, each node is clickable to access directly the blog on internet, it was done using Adobe Illustrator after collecting all blog urls and sorting them in a MindMap using Mindomo.

Using the metro metaphor, you remember the famous web2.0 map from the Japanese agency Information Architects (updated 2008) :

The other metaphor often used to map a web territory is the planisphere (see my previous article), and the last good examples I’ve seen were the ones from :

• designer XKCD for the map of online communities

• designer XKCD again for a map of the internet

• designer Christophe Druaux (blog Oui Non) for his detailed (subjective but with heavy number crunching) maps of the French “blogarchie” (2007 edition) and Forums

And last but not least, a more artistic version by Berling artist eBoy, using the city and pixelart to present web2.0 services :

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Some of you (especially in France), have probably already heard of or even read him. Matthieu Ricard is one of the most prominent faces (and voices) of Bouddhism in France, he wrote several books including "The Monk and the Philosopher : a Father and Son discuss the Meaning of Life" with Jean-Francois Revel, his father. But Matthieu is also a photographer who published many photo books like "Tibet, an inner journey", and I had the chance to briefly interview him during the Université d'Eté du Medef where he was taking part in a round table on "Balayons devant notre porte : is Occident's way of thinking the only good one ? Does globalization help us to understand other ways of thinking and to cast a critical eye on occidental concepts or, on the contrary, does it tend towards uniformization (and impoverishement) of the frame of reference ?".

Because of his own experience both as a scientist, photographer and bouddhist monk, I asked him about what lessons he could draw for the role of images in the communication in the enterprise world. He advocates that images give a note of hope, and that pictures of the world can be a reminder of the beauty of human nature. For him, images in communication can help us to realize our inner potential for goodness, to give a note of hope and not loose it !

A positive and poetical message in our sometime stark world of competition and research for today !

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