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Inspired by a previous meta question on tag trending, my 'Sunday afternoon' project was to plot the relationship between the most popular tags on Stack Overflow. The result is quite pretty:

Tag relationship graph

You can play with an interactive version on my blog. I have published the source code for this control on Code Project. Enjoy!

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  • Did you look at other approaches to graph layouts besides the circle?
    – Flexo
    Feb 20, 2012 at 13:30
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    As pretty as it looks - I'm still not gonna install SilverLight... ;)
    – Lix
    Feb 20, 2012 at 13:33
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    @Lix why not? Do you not have Flash installed either?
    – ChrisF Mod
    Feb 20, 2012 at 15:09
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    @ChrisF - Sadly in our day and age one does not simply uninstall flash. Too many sites depend on it. Silverlight on the other hand, is not a requirement in most cases. It can produce some great stuff - no doubt - but no sites I use on a daily/weekly/yearly basis require Silverlight. Also installing it on Linux makes me feel all icky and hypocritical :P
    – Lix
    Feb 20, 2012 at 15:15
  • @awoodland I must admit, I didn't. I was inspired by various other cicrular relationship graphs I have found online. Can you think of a better way of representing this data?
    – ColinE
    Feb 20, 2012 at 15:44
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    I was thinking something like: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… - blow the top 40 tags things and run it for all tags with more than N questions perhaps.
    – Flexo
    Feb 20, 2012 at 15:50
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    @awoodland thanks for the reference; the results you link to look very nice. However, I am not sure that method of rendering helps you to draw any conclusions from the data - the main goal of this approach, as described in Wikipedia, is to render the data in an "aesthetically pleasing way". I think the circular representation I have opted for hopefully makes it easier to understand the data and draw conclusions from it. Although, it does look pretty too :-P
    – ColinE
    Feb 20, 2012 at 16:02
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    @Lix: Neither my iPhone nor my MacBook Pro have Flash installed. I don't miss it.
    – Cody Gray - on strike
    Feb 21, 2012 at 2:34
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    @Cody - neither my mobile device nor my personal computers are apple products... I don't miss it. ;)
    – Lix
    Feb 21, 2012 at 8:14
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    Nicely done, @Colin!
    – Shog9
    Mar 8, 2012 at 17:28
  • Is there an R interface for the Stack API?
    – Glenn Strycker
    Apr 3, 2013 at 13:45
  • I don't like that line that runs from Java to JavaScript, as I'd be willing to bet most of them incorrectly tagged one or the other. Java to Jquery, although a thinner line, is even more concerning.
    – ArtOfWarfare
    May 13, 2015 at 19:40
  • The link in the question is for the blog, not to the blog post showing that plot.
    – apaderno
    Apr 28, 2016 at 5:17

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