NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration in Excel

Microsoft Research has released a new Excel 2007 add-in for rendering network visualizations

NodeXL is a powerful and easy-to-use interactive network visualisation and analysis tool that leverages the widely available MS Excel application as the platform for representing generic graph data, performing advanced network analysis and visual exploration of networks. The tool supports multiple social network data providers that import graph data (nodes and edge lists) into the Excel spreadsheet.

The graph visualizations seem stunning for Excel. An example is shown below from Visual Business Intelligence, where the graph depicts shared Board memberships of major US companies.

More information on using NodeXL and the external people Microsoft collaborated with to create the tool can be found here at CodePlex.

Some books on Scribd

As I mentioned in my last post, there is a lot of very interesting and detailed content of all types being uploaded to Scribd. According to Wikipedia,

Scribd is a document sharing website. It houses 'more than 2 million documents' and 'drew more than 21 million unique visitors in May 2008, little more than a year after launching, and claims 1.5 million registered users.' The site was initially funded with $12,000 funding from Y Combinator, but has since received over $3.7 million from Redpoint Ventures and The Kinsey Hills Group.

You can even find whole books on the site. Here are some interesting documents that I found from a hour or so of searching

• Probability for Dummies
• Simulation and Monte Carlo with Applications
• Podcast Business Models
• Excel 2007 for Scientists
• Risk Analysis: Theory and Practice

I think I will drop my Safari account as I now have enough reading for far more than foreseeable future. I also uploaded a paper that I co-wrote on Data Centric Security
A Data Centric Security Model

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Computer Science Technology security data centric securit