Apple is perhaps the most talked about company in the world, online. Now, thanks to Apple's litigation strategy, Samsung is the second most talked about. Here is a small thread of evidence.
The concept map below was produced from news' reports about Apple early on the 19th December 2012.
The map is made up of all articles on the first page of Google News, for the search term "Apple" as of about 4.00 am EST. It shows Apple, in blue, at the center of all other terms.That just denotes the fact that this is an Apple centric map.
You can see from the map however that coverage of Apple is dominated by the term Samsung. That cannot be good.
The map is a bit like an Apple Wordl except the terms are not just words - they are concepts. That is to say, each word is an aggregation of terms (see below).
Apple can especially be seen in relation to all other concepts colored in blue. These are the ones most closely connected with Apple - e.g. Samsung and patents.
The day before, Samsung had dropped its lawsuits to prevent sales of the iPhone and iPad in some European countries.
The day before that the judge in Apple's San Jose action had refused to ban the sales of certain Samsung products in the USA.
But that was by no means all the news about Apple. Apple's share price was on a rebound, Apple could be seen rearranging its global supply chain, probably with a view to doing much more of its own manufacturing, and Apple seemed to be deepening its relationship with Facebook.
In other words Apple's other news was overshadowed by its relationship with Samsung.
The map is not a Worldl. It comes from the folks at Leximancer and the product is called "Text is beautiful". The words are in fact concept. Leximancer's uniqueness lies in converting words into concepts and themes.
A few more words of explanation:
The blue theme is the theme Apple. The concept Apple aggregates all words that appear to be like Apple - so for example it should aggregate references to "world's wealthiest technology company", though I doubt it is quite that sophisticated.
The value of "Text is Beautiful" is it gives readers a way to get a quick overview of a range of articles. I mentioned Leximancer in an earlier piece - it can do similar summaries of very large text collections - it could for example sit between search and a reader, providing similar summaries of a search return.
As information becomes too voluminous I am convinced we need these tools in our daily lives. They are as important as the written word.
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