I write for Smartmobs.com as does Mike Love, but we’ve never met, or even exchanged emails.  However, I am very impressed with Mike Love’s post on the Genealogy of Influence in Smartmobs.com the other day. 

Using Wikipedia and XML programming, Mike Love has managed to map the Genealogy of important people – I just happened to pick artists because this is an art blog and I’m an artist.    I think there’s the begining of much bigger idea – just imagine if you could search on persons or firm name and come up with a chart of the relationships of people that person knows or that firm is connected to. 

When you hover over an Artist’s name, a short biography of the artist is displayed.  Right now, the idea is basic, but it’s the right direction and much different than what Kartoo is doing (see below).

I see the future of Search as visual (at least in the sense of organizing information) and while Kartoo’s relationship of URL with a keyword (via location in a map) is interesting to look at, it’s really not very useful at the end of the day, at least, not for me.

What Mike Love has done, using Wikipedia, is a lot more useful – you need to be able to put anything into a search and get the kind of map he’s producing for well known people who influenced each other (or the order of it).

Now it’s time to sign off….I hear the last day of Wired NextFest is today (Sunday, October 1st, 2006) and I may want to take my son to it (if he does not put up too much of a fight or my back is in too much pain).  We’ll see – maybe sleep will help a little.

Signing off.