A New Company Tries to Sort the Web's Chaos (Free subscription required)
Quote: "But at a time when the valley's digerati are bemoaning a technology industry recession and the death of innovation, Mr. Hawken's Grokker software, which is intended to allow personal-computer users to visually make sense of collections of thousands or hundreds of thousands of text documents, is creating a buzz. The software is attracting significant interest from large corporations and universities."
Comment: The article highlights a new company Groxis - a visual approach to information organization - allowing users to see how information fits together. From the site: "Grokker builds precise and detailed knowledge maps containing visual cues and relationships between the data. The map itself contains powerful metadata that vividly describes the "nature" of the data collection. The Grokker product enables map generation and the ability to collaborate, extend, edit, delete, save, and share any attribute or subset of the map. This approach allows the Grokker to negotiate any type of network, file system, or database saving time, resources, and most importantly, generates far more useful results."
Other visual programs, kartOO, Antartica and Vivisimo, are also mentioned in the article.
Good quote from another article on Groxis: "But we need more sophisticated methods for gathering, massaging and making connections among all the pieces of information that enter our lives each day -- everything from e-mail to Web pages to phone numbers and more. So when I see useful tools, I pay attention."