Everyone knows the Web is all about linking, literally, a web of sites related through hyperlinks. Mitch Ratcliffe, founder of Persuadio, LLC at MyDensity.com, blogger for RedHerring.com’s “The Now” Blog and Lakewood resident, took a few minutes to explain his new online link relationship mapping company called Persuadio and his MyDensity service.

DANA GREENLEE: You just announced your Persuadio company at the PC Forum. Tell us about it.

MITCH RATCLIFFE: Persuadio develops Web-based data collection, analysis and visualization platforms. Persuadio’s modular system supports rapid development of data-, organization- or community-specific data gathering and normalization modules and our mapping tools can be customized to display a variety of relationship types. Our maps are navigable guides to your customers’ or employees’ relationship to information and one another. We let you tune into network influence and relationships. We’re going to show the world itself in a new way.

GREENLEE: Your first service is MyDensity.com. It’s quite fun to try out by simply entering in a Web site url. What does it do?

RATCLIFFE: MyDensity.com is a free service that maps two degrees of the link relationships around any URL. The maps show only links, not the strength of relationships, traffic flow and so forth that add other dimensions to a map of influence. MyDensity just makes the basic capabilities available. We want to work with companies and others who need to show how they create connections or to explore connections they have that aren’t immediately evident from lists of links. You can embed links to maps in your Web pages for free. You can generate a map by typing “http://mydensity.com/map?url=http://[URLyouwanttomap]”_ in the address bar of your browser. We encourage you to drop the MyDensity Bookmarklet into your bookmarks bar. It generates a map for any site open in the browser with a single click.

GREENLEE: It’s quite a visually intriguing map full of concentric circles – and it’s very interactive. Describe what users will see.

RATCLIFFE: When the map opens in a Java-based interface, you can mouse over any node to see its name displayed in the Site: field just above the zoom in (“+”) and zoom out (“-“) buttons in the upper left corner of the map. As you mouse over the nodes in the map, you will see the active links between sites illuminated in blue. This shows you the map-within-the-map of the direct connections between sites. Double-clicking any node in the map will open a new browser window and display the Web site. It’s a simple way to browse the neighborhood around any site. Our maps open with the site you chose in the center, with the sites it is directly connected to arrayed around that site in a circle. Second-degree connections—the sites connected to the first-degree sites but not to the URL you mapped—around the first-degree sites to which they are linked. Maps of popular sites will be quite dense and you may want to check the Fengshuinate box to see the map of how all the sites are interconnected, which rearranges the map to show the most central sites in the network. Unchecking Fengshuinate will freeze the map in its new arrangement; the longer you leave Fengshuinate checked, the more dispersed the map will become. Clicking once on any node in the map will reorient the map around that node. If the node is connected only to one other site, it will appear by itself with a line leading off to the right. You can also browse all the sites in the map by clicking the Jump to: menu, which displays a list of all the sites in the map. Many maps will have more than 10,000 nodes, so this is one of the simplest ways to look through a map—selecting a site in the Jump to: menu orients the map around that site. That’s the one-minute guide to MyDensity.

More information about MyDensity can be found at http://mydensity.com/ or Mitch’s blog at http://ratcliffeblog.com. The full one-hour audio interview is at http://WebTalkRadio.com.