Sparklines to track conversations0
Ben coded it for the Observer blog.
The idea is quite simple, and very intuitive: instead of simply showing the number of current comments to a post, the sparkline is a small graph indicating the number of incoming links over the “life” period of the conversation on a post, as tracked by technorati. Here's an example:

Obviously you can find more (live) examples aver at the observer!
The whole thing is powered by a perl script, that will be published soon along with the site templates here. Cool!
Too bad that with my actual rates of comments, it'll be useless to implement this stuff here... ;)
Sparklines are among the tools indicated by Edward Tufte for tiny representations of data. Quite inspiring, definitely a must read if you care about this stuff.
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La fine del petrolio, l’avvio di Gusto, la curva della popolarit e la societ civile....
The guy behind the red nose and this blog is Riccardo "Bru" Cambiassi.