Take a search term “seed”. Pass it to a search engine: Google, Yahoo etc. Examine the content of the top “n” results for “themes”, take each theme and repeat the search – Hey presto you get a “mind map” from the web.
As I commented, this is sucking up some of my time at the minute. My simple first attempt, searching on the word “moon” gave the following. Ok, its not brilliant but more than I expected, this could become a real time suck…
Still playing! I have reduced the depth of the tree and tuned (slightly) the way words are chosen. The tool produces different and interesting results on each run. I really must stop playing with this!!! It’s cool though, enter some words and get a new perspective on them.
Here is a mini mind map for “extreme programming”:
Ok, this started out as a fun thought at Xmas. Its now taking over my mind! I played about with some python and the Yahoo search API and started to get interesting results – Not good, but interesting!
This is now distracting me from building up services on my slice! To the point where I’m going to play about with NLTK and see where it goes.
If (and when) something appears I will commit it to my non-existent repository (missing due to this activity!)
If anyone would like to play with this, reply or get in touch…