Got a trackback ping (to the Technorati vote links / duelling blogs item I posted earlier) from Olivier Travers, in an old-but-currently-updated entry of his called Visualizing Webs of BlogThreads. Many thanks, Olivier... there are some very important pointers here, so I'm quoting your short entry verbatim so others can track these historical links, beginning with Jon Schull's posting of June 2002:

Visualizing Webs of BlogThreads

[06/30/02:] Jon Schull attempts to map a conversation thread spread among several blogs.

03/17/03 update: Towards structured blogging.

05/21/03 update: Dynamics of a Blogosphere Story.

04/16/04 update: Sharpreader - Threaded RSS.

11/20/04 update: Technorati vote links... an idea.

The ideas of Schull, and indeed those of others who commented on his post, show how the graphical linking themes popularised in Kartoo, Tinderbox, and Storyspace did indeed capture the imagination of many. Visualising discussion spaces has moved a long way since those days, as highlighted in the work of my colleague Simon Buckingham Shum (+ colleagues) and their work on Compendium, ScholOnto, Visualizing Argumentation, and related projects.

But visualizing is in many ways less crucial to me in the short run than automatically aggregating the relevant threads (which in turn might well seed the beginnings of a visualization if I so chose) -- and therefore I'm delighted that Olivier included a link to an article about SharpReader, which does exactly that!