Complexity and Social Networks Blog

Yet again, social networking platforms seem to be playing a critical role in enabling social unrest--now in Iran. Some of us in the network analysis community are probably ambivalent, given all the trouble we go to in reminding people that there were social networks before the internet. Yet it seems that technology is making all the difference. Also troubling--someone tell me if I'm wrong--is the fact that network position, as traditionally conceived, doesn't seem so important when anyone at all can subscribe to an online information source, and when information that fails to reach you through one channel will probably find its way to you through another.

One can study online networking incrementally, by asking how people use the internet to service social ties and perhaps expand their number and reach. But the case of Iran, and before that Moldava, suggests that our baseline assumption, that people are not tied unless we find strong evidence to the contrary (e.g., socializing), might have to be turned on its head. It's not obvious to me that traditional social network analysis will take us very far in understanding such situations, and social movement perspectives might do only slightly better. At the risk of seeming too excitable, we might be witnessing a social discontinuity comparable to the Industrial Revolution, and equally demanding of new theories. That should be exciting to social scientists, but given that we're still puzzling through the French Revolution one wonders how long it'll take us to get our act together.

Posted by David Gibson at 10:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I just came back from the three-day event (5/18-20) "ISPRAT 1st International Government CIO Knoweldge Exchange" in Washington, D.C. ISPRAT is a non-profit think tank based in Germany. The think tank's scope is on technology and innovation/trends in government and bridging the gap between disciplines. Thus ISPRAT's members come from industry, academia and government. Usually it organizes government CIO summits and government related studies in Germany. The U.S. event brought its activities to a new level. The underlying idea was to bring German/EU and U.S. government CIOs together to exchange ideas/experiences on current challenges and trends.

The first day was spent at CSC, Falls Church, VA, talking about identity management (linked to post @Shaping Network Society inspired by the movie "Beyond the shadow of a doubt"), privacy, trust and enterprise architecture (case stuides on MITA, IRS and DoE). Many might not be aware of it, but both areas - identity management and enterprise architecture - are fundamental to Government 2.0. A couple of former CIOs joined the discussion and offered their insights on issues such as cross-boundary collaboration: Dan Mintz (DoT), Pat Schambach (DHS) and Mark Kneidinger (NY, VA, DoS).

The morning of the second day we spent at the White House Conference Center. Officially Supported by GSA and the U.S. CIO Council , we had a couple of acting CIOs present to offer their insights in a roundtable discussion with German, Austrian and Mexican government executives. Unfortunately, Vivek Kundra couldn't come as he had to testify on Information Security on the hill. (Update 5/29: Read the Whitehouse Cyberspace Policy Review).Two take-aways. First, when talking about new collaboration tools, the CIOs admitted that it is quite a challenge to align social media with the existing laws and regulations--some dating back to the 70s--"they can get you fired, put you in jail or burden you with huge fines". Second, data.gov will go live on May 1st--it now is.

Using Cisco's telepresence center in Herndon, VA, the group--including gov execs sitting in Germany--exchanged thoughts with the Paul Cosgrave (NYC) and Teri Takai (California). It was the first time I participated in such a"video conference" (Cisco doesn't like that term) and I was amazed. The world really becomes a small place (D.C., L.A., New York, Berlin) and while there are still some minor glitches to it, you quickly emerge in a conversation that feels quite real. For dinner, we had Jackie Patillo, the acting CIO of DoT who was also willing to share her knowledge with the group.

The final day we spent time at IBM's Institute for eGovernment with an introductory part by Sherry Amos from SAP on the economic stimulus package and transparency. A vivid discussion started and I am curious to see how some ideas will be transferred to Germany/Europe. Many were skeptical about the use of Web 2.0 tools in the coming national election in Germany. Unlike the Obama campaign, Angela Merkel and Frank Walter Steinmeier, the candidates running for chancellor, lack a comparable story and mission. Moreover, a survey among participants conducted on the first day, showed that most perceived the level of transparency in government in Germany as rather poor. Other topics included: cloud computing (Among others, people wondered about: how does this connect the security needs of government?), government 2020 and "smart cities" (everything connected).

Several people twittered about the event: Ines Mergel (Ines also recently posted some Twitter recommendations), Anke Domscheit, Thomas Langkabel and Philipp Mueller.

We also managed to convince/bring Harald Lemke, the former CIO of the German State of Hesse, to the Twitter community.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 5:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

EDIT: I changed the embedded video since the old trailer was taken down

Some of you may have already seen the fan-film The Hunt for Gollum, an original prequel of sorts to the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Fan fiction is by no means new. There are plenty of Star Trek stories written by fans, super hero home movies, and others all produced simply because the fans wanted to continue the story, all with no financial gain for themselves. Normally this is branded "fair use" and the companies that own the rights ignore the efforts of these amateur writers and filmmakers.

And then a movie like The Hunt for Gollum comes along. Watching the trailer for the first time, you believe you're watching the trailer for the next Hollywood blockbuster. There are drooling orcs, sweeping shots of spectacular mountains, and incredible special effects. But this movie was written, filmed, and produced for $4500 by a group of about 150 UK Lord of the Rings fans for free distribution on the web.

Watching the finished product is inspiring. While it isn't the best movie I've ever seen (it lasts about half an hour), the fact that I would even compare it to multi-million dollar movies staffed by thousands of professionals is incredible. Certainly this is due in no small part to the dedication of the group that created this movie, and by no means would this amount of dedication be the same for every potential amateur project. After all, this still took years to make. Potentially this could be viewed as a threat to professional filmmakers, as discussed in an NPR article.

One could even wonder if this model could extend to other industries. Could cars be designed and manufactured by weekend enthusiasts? With GM phasing out their Pontiac brand, could die hard fans create their own Pontiac and start rolling out a new line of cars on a limited scale for no profit? When rapid prototyping and 3D printing tools become more widespread, this seems like a possibility.

This might be some of what Prof. Tom Malone discussed in his book The Future of Work, a completely new kind of organization. But interestingly The Hunt for Gollum was a much more physically based production than what he had envisioned. Certainly remote collaboration tools helped the group put this film together, but what really elevated this project was the close knit face-to-face collaboration that was employed to make this movie work. It seems that while new technological tools can push us to new heights, old fashioned teamwork is still crucial for success.

Posted by Ben Waber at 11:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)

What is the motivation behind Facebook and other forms of online self-presentation, such as, say, blogging? I posed this question (with respect to Facebook) to my undergraduates. Their answers included a desire for social contact and curiosity about other people (for which, perhaps, self-disclosure is the medium of exchange). Here are some other possibilities:

1. According to Cooley, we see ourselves through the eyes of others, or at least we try hard to. But what others? Whomever we come into contact with, I suppose, for those are the people whose reactions we can gauge. But then online self-presentation poses a challenge, for this is presenting ourselves to people we might not otherwise encounter, and whom we might not ever encounter in person. I conjecture--and perhaps Cooley anticipated this--that we see ourselves through the eyes of whomever we've received responses from in the recent past. Then once a blogger has, perhaps under pressure from a former colleague, presented himself to the blogosphere once and received some responses, he sees himself through the (imagined) eyes of those same people (or at least some typification of that sort of person), and feels answerable to them.

2. Once one has a taste of externalizing one's thoughts and imagining that others care to ponder them, thinking that is not externalized seems kind of pointless, perhaps like singing in the shower after performing in front of a large audience. I've had this experience after reviewing books for journals, of feeling deflated upon then reading a book for no one's benefit but my own. (It passes, unless one feeds the habit by writing Amazon reviews.)

3. Consistent with (2), one acquires the cognitive habit of thinking and experiencing on behalf of an audience, and perhaps of formulating a blog entry as the experience unfolds, so that half the work is done by the time the experience is complete. Whether this diminishes the intensity of the original experience, I won't conjecture. Obviously Twitter takes this to a new extreme.

4. When my students talk about maintaining social contact, I assume they mean contact with high school and college friends, and that a precondition for friendship is, at least in some circles, continuous self-accounting and monitoring of the self-accounts of others. This should probably be distinguished from blogging (or Facebooking) to combat genuine isolation, of the sort that my students are at little risk of but that probably besets folks stranded in the suburbs and beyond. The problem with this formulation is that it portrays online interaction as a last act of desperation, akin to talking to a Wilson soccer ball, whereas it seems that a genuine, if virtual, community readily pops into existence for anyone looking for one. And then who's to say that it's less "real" than a clutch of friends chatting at the coffee shop? As I tell my students: no moral evaluations. No, not even in the footnotes.

Posted by David Gibson at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Facebook statistics recently provided by Alexander Schellong--such as that the site adds an astonishing 600,000 users per day--are worthy of serious contemplation by social scientists still playing catch-up when it comes to this and other forms of online communication. But at the risk of seeming curmudgeonly (I imagine my undergrads, Facebook devotees all, rolling their eyes), I want to make a prediction. Social scientists are very fond of "capital," which is a type of resource with a plausible connection to some desired outcome. These include economic capital (money), human capital (skills), cultural capital (powers of discernment vis-a-vis cultural objects), conversational capital (interesting things to talk about) and social capital (social connections). To this list I predict that we will eventually want to add something that I am tempted to call anti-social capital, which is a snarky (and imprecise) term for the absence of ties of a certain type, namely those whose main consequence is that you spend a lot of time online communicating with people who, like you, have a lot of time to spend socializing online. It's not hard to foresee why someone without such connections would fare better at school, in the workplace, and in their family relations than someone with them, other things being equal.

Of course, the problem is not merely time diverted from more serious pursuits--exercise, learning, thinking long and hard about life's problems, interacting with those with whom one shares microbes--but also the disclosure of personal and potentially damaging information. That might point to yet another kind of capital, which I'll call non-self-disclosure capital, which is the state of not having made public (especially online) information about yourself that could result in a serious loss of face, life prospects, and possibly safety if the information gets circulated beyond its intended audience.

Posted by David Gibson at 11:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Speaking of contagion, there was an interesting piece in the Christian Science Monitor on the spread of viruses in social media, such as Facebook. Interestingly, this problem apparently increased substantially in 2008.

Let me make a short suggestion that there is an opportunity, with the social media, to better understand the epidemiology of computer viruses. In particular, environments such as Facebook are self contained, and have a great deal of information on the strength of relationships among individuals. Further, it should be possible, after the fact, to trace exactly when and where the virus was passed from one individual to another (difficult to do with viruses that affect humans). It should therefore be possible to link topology to spread in a fashion that is generally impossible. There is, in short, an opportunity to greatly advance understanding of contagion with data that companies like Facebook, Bebo, etc, have-- if anyone from these companies is reading, consider this a short research proposal ; - ).

Posted by David Lazer at 6:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

There was an interesting article in today's New York Times on Google books. Google books is a massive effort to scan, essentially, all print media, going back centuries. (Also see effort by Open Content Alliance.) Partially putting aside the important issues around control of the data, the digitization of texts creates the capacity to access, organize, and analyze much of what humanity has "thought" in recent history. From the perspective of a social scientist, the exciting prospect is to view this corpus as, perhaps the most extraordinary data set ever assembled (especially when combined with recent developments in natural language processing). Can we see the rise and fall of social movements? Of ways of thinking about the world, linking these constructs to space and time? This is part of a broader movement, as I have written before, toward a "computational social science."

The one aspect of control that this does raise is what access will there be to the entire Google books corpus for researchers? Indeed, part of the concern that has driven the Open Content Alliance (as I understand it) are the issues around public access to the corpus, where, for example, libraries will need to pay subscription fees for access to what could be a Google monopoly. There are similar concerns, as I see it, regarding access to those who wish to do research on these data. For those readers of the blog who have insight on this, please post comments.

Posted by David Lazer at 10:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My colleague, Archon Fung, in conjunction with ABC news, has launched a "crowd sourcing" initiative to identify problems at polling places, called MyFairElection. A full description is below. Please do forward on this information, and contribute information to the project. Here are the details:

MyFairElection is an exciting project to help make the vote fair and accessible this November 4th. To participate, simply sign up (instructions below) to rate your experience of voting this year.

Did you encounter specific problems such as long lines, confusing ballots, broken machines, or closed polling places? Or, was the process of voting quite pleasant and easy?

As thousands of citizens rate their voting experiences, MyFairElection will produce a real-time "weather map" of voting conditions across the country. This map will allow viewers to see where it is easy to vote, and where people have encountered obstacles. Journalists, advocates, officials, and citizens can use this map to address obstacles to voting in real time.

So, go to this link and sign up. You will be asked to rate your voting experience on election day. You can comment, describe particular problems, and even submit pictures.

MyFairElection.com is a project of MyFairElection and ABC News. ABC News will feature the heat map as part of their election day coverage. Journalists will use the information that you submit to help identify and report on election day ballot problems.

Here are more detailed instructions.

Register [Do this before election day, November 4!]

In order to submit your polling place observations, you must create an account on MyFairElection.com.

Step 1: Use an Internet browser (such as Explorer, FireFox, or Safari) on your computer to go to this link:

Step 2: In the upper left hand corner, you will see a box to "Sign up Now." Enter your email address, your zip code, then click "submit."

Step 3: You will receive an email message from MyFairElection.com. Keep this message! You will use the link in that message to submit your polling place ratings on election day.

You will also receive an email message from myfairelection.com on election day reminding you to vote and to rate your voting experience.

Rate a polling place on the web:

Step 1: Go to the link provided in your registration email message. It will look something like this:http://myfairelection.com/rate/7ebe4eb. You don't have to type it in; just click on the link from your email program or copy the link and paste it into your browser window.

If you've deleted the email message from MyFairElection.com or can't find it, just register again. You'll receive another message with the link.

Step 2: After you clink on the link, your browser will take you to the ratings page.

Use the ratings page to tell us about your polling experience: one star is terrible and five stars is excellent.

You can also report specific problems, offer general comments, and even upload pictures of your voting experience on this page. After you've filled in the appropriate spaces, click "Submit."

That's it! Use the map of the U.S. that will appear on myfairelection.com on November 4th to view ratings from people all over the country.

Rate a polling place by email:

If you're on the road on election day, you can also submit ratings by email, on a PDA such as a BlackBerry or iPhone. Note that we will accept email ratings only from registered users.

Step 1: Create a new email message addressed to rate@myfairelection.com

Step 2: In the body of that email message, enter
(1) your zip-code
(2) 1 to 5 asterisks ("***") for overall rating
(3) any comments you might have [one line only!]

And send the message! You will receive an email message that verifies receipt of your rating.

Thank you for participating in MyFairElection!

Posted by David Lazer at 10:12 AM | Permalink

Interesting blog posting from techPresident comparing Obama's "Neighbor to Neighbor" tool to McCain's "Voter to Voter".

Some key observations:

If you do a Google search for the words Obama and "neighbor to neighbor," Google returns 479,000 hits. A search for McCain and "voter to voter" returns 325 hits.

According to Google, the total number of sites linking to my.barackobama.com/n2n is 475, with 396 of them being blogs. The total number of links to www.johnmccain.com/v2v is 18, with none from blogs.

Posted by David Lazer at 3:16 PM | Permalink

A just released Pew report, Networked Families (by Tracy Kennedy, Aaron Smith, Amy Tracy Wells, and Barry Wellman), may be of interest to some readers of the blog. To quote from the abstract:

The internet and cell phones have become central components of modern family life. Among all household types, the traditional nuclear family has the highest rate of technology usage and ownership.

The survey shows that these high rates of technology ownership affect family life. In particular, cell phones allow family members to stay more regularly in touch even when they are not physically together. Moreover, many members of married-with-children households view material online together.

Also, go to the Washington Post story.

The report is chock full of interesting data on how modern communication technologies have become integrated into the daily lives of American families. I am a bit concerned, however, about the interpretation that these technologies have actually improved communication within families. For example, respondents are asked whether the Internet has improved connections to family members/friends/etc, and given the choices a lot, some, only a little, not at all. It is problematic to interpret these particular results as supporting the proposition that the Internet has improved communication within families, because (1) no choices are given that the Internet has undermined connections, and, more important, (2) respondents are not in a position to construct a counterfactual. (At least, I can no more imagine what communication within my family would be like without the Internet than it would be without the automobile.) That is, I would be cautious in interpreting some of these results as supporting the proposition that the Internet, for example, really has improved communication within the family.

Interesting puzzle to me, in a question to adults (from p. 28) about whether the Internet and cell phones have made their families closer than their families when they grew up, 28% of families with cell phones and Internet in their households indicate that these technologies have made their families closer, but, oddly, 17% of families without either also indicate that these technologies have made their families closer. It is striking to me that there is not a bigger difference-- is this because of indirect access to these technologies (at school, work, through friends)?

Neat factoid from report (p. 24): women generally seem to communicate more with their children than men, but there is a particularly large gender gap in text messaging with children, with 28% of women reporting texting their kids, and only 12% of men. I am also surprised that as many as one in twenty five parents communicate with their children (age 7-17, so this includes many parents who don't have kids who are using these Facebook, etc) via social networking sites at least once a day. My oldest considers it scandalous that I am even on Facebook, and has flatly forbidden me from friending her....

Posted by David Lazer at 10:30 PM | Permalink

Technology, societal changes and new management practices influence how we perceive the roles of government. Moreover, they may transform how government does business and creates public value. However, we might as well fall into the trap of technological determinism--moving from eGovernment straight to Government X.0 hype. Therefore, many predicted a significant transformation of government thanks to new technologies such as ICT, in particular, the Internet while current research shows that the transformation has not happened (e.g. work by West, Norris, Fountain or Lazer). eDemocracy also remains a rethorical promise (Mahrer/Krimmer; UN).

In any case, while I am still working on my contribution to the discourse on Web 2.0 & Government, I have two recommendations for any of our readers interested in the matter:

First, Philipp Mueller, who has already contributed some guest entries to this blog, is offering a course on "Government 2.0" for master students at Erfurt University's School of Public Policy (ESPP) (Spring term 2008). The course covers various aspects such as Web 2.0, open source, NPM, PPP, citizen-centric governance or performance management. The sessions can be viewed online or downloaded as an mp3 file.

Second, a blog by David Osimo, a researcher at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre IPTS, who is working on the impact of Web 2.0 on public services.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 5:19 PM | Permalink

Online gaming is a multi-million dollar business. World of Warcraft, one of the most successful role playing games (RPGs) which is said to generating revenues over $250 million. Yet, this business allows third parties to make money too. Given an average age of over 25, many players in the US or Europe don't find the time or just don't want to spend numerous hours in the virtual worlds to develop their characters. The solution comes from countries like China. There, virtual gold is mined or characters are "trained" and then sold via online auctions to those in need. Today's NYT offers an in depth-look at the life of the virtual gold farmers.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 11:25 PM | Permalink

The New York Hall of Science is the host of the 2007 NetSci conference and has also an ongoing exhibition on social networks. It shows kids hands on how social networks are established or fall apart.

It’s a very cool exhibition: the creator Stephen Uzzo has just walked us through it without explaining the different parts. Everyone had to experience for themselves how connections on the Internet are created for example, how a hub connects to the closest spokes around him (we were all standing on a light show type of board, where each of us was a node and when you move around the connections are changing, depending on the shortest path). There were also real spiders creating a spider web.

I will add more on this during the conference and hopefully some pictures...

Posted by Ines Mergel at 6:54 PM | Permalink

I recently stumpled on the following website which offers a neat collection of various network images/ visulizations and links to the respective projects in the field of social, art, biology, business, computer systems, food, internet, transportation, knowledge, music or pattern recognition. I am sure you can find something for your next powerpoint...

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I found this neat map covering our emerging digital identities on Flickr by Cavazza:

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 12:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The PEW Internet & American Life Project has just published a new study on Online Social Networking Websites and Youth.

They define online social networking websites as:

A social networking site is an online place where a user can create a profile and build a personal network that connects him or her to other users.

One of the main and interesting findings is that 55% of the teens between 12-17 are using social networking platforms to connect with their friends online - girls mainly to reinforce existing relationships and boys more to connect to new friends or dating purposes. The findings also show, that 82% of the respondents said, that they are using online social networking sites to stay in contact with friends who they rarely see.

This supports the theory in our working paper on the sustainability of online ties, that social networking platforms can support the maintenance of existing ties or to reconnect with former friends. See my earlier entry on the sustainability of online ties here on the IQ blog and also on my social networking blog.

Posted by Ines Mergel at 5:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I just discovered the first age-relevant search engine - slash social networking plattform: cRANKy.com. It is targeted towards +50 year olds (seniors and baby boomers). They intend to provide information on specific topics such as jobs after retirement, how to become 100 years old, how to make new friends, etc.

I like the “How to make friends” section - which ties into what Thomas and I are working on: people in specific phases of their lifes are only adding specific types of (new) contacts to their network of friends. Especially when you retire - you won’t see your co-workers on a daily basis anymore, your routines are changing and you might loose some of your contacts. See my earlier post on the sustainability of online ties.

It’s also great, that the most relevant topics are pre-sorted by relevance (to avoid being overwhelmed by too many results), there are some prominent buttons to increase the text size and you can top 10 yourself, so that information can be pushed at you.

Posted by Ines Mergel at 12:21 PM | Permalink

Recently we heard more and more that online social networking platforms don’t really work - Alexa teaches us, that people tend to sign up for MySpace, Facebook or openBC, but platform providers have the hardest time to keep the network alive: people tend to sign up, but don’t or only infrequently come back to their profile.
This made my co-author Thomas Langenberg, EPFL Lausanne in Switzerland, and me start to think about the question: What makes online ties sustainable? We came up with a research design that looks at four different phases of a life cycle of online ties.

Here is the abstract of our paper:

Recently, the Pew Internet & American Life Project published a study about the number of social relations people maintain online and the omnipresent question was raised again: are actual face-toface contacts declining over time and are they replaced by online social interactions. Our virtual life is scattered in online profiles across sites such as openBC.com, Friendster.com, Match.com or MySpace.com. There are currently more than 400 different online social networking sites – with new sites popping up every day. Building on existing factors of persistence and sustainability of network ties in general, we address the key research questions: Which factors lead to the creation, maintenance, decay and reconnection of online network ties? Our research draws on prominent issues in the social network literature, which address the gap between research on offline and online social networks. We examine individual, dyadic, structural and content-related characteristics to understand how and why actors in different phases of their life cycle turn to online ties. Within the presented research framework, we derive propositions and develop a research design to collect and analyze qualitative and quantitative network data. The overall goal is to develop recommendations on how online social networks can become sustainable over time, and we develop questions and avenues for further research.

We came up with the following taxonomy of online vs. offline networks in our paper:

Full citation:

Mergel, I./Langenberg, T. (2006): What makes online ties sustainable? A Research Design Proposal to Analyze Online Social Networks, PNG Working paper No. PNG06-002, Cambridge.

Posted by Ines Mergel at 4:00 AM | Permalink

Social Network Theory and its principles are applied by more and more companies in a way that some of us might not be aware of yet. So what we buy, how we rate products/services, post in forums, pictures we upload or present of ourselves on the web is significantly influencing other, likeminded individuals. In return we are influenced by the network cluster we belong to for a specific habit and the like. Collaborative filtering is a key component of using social networks for different purposes. Further information can be found here. Below you will find a list of various industry and application examples:

Social Networking plattforms
There are the obvious social networking online plattforms. Among them are the open business and personal contact manegement oriented like Tribe.net , openbc, friendster or the inivitation only communities like asmallworld. Either planned or already implemented users can take advantage of added services (search functionality, messaging) by paying a monthly fee 10< USD. Furthermore, there are the rather dating/partner match making plattforms like match or eharmony.

Retail/eCommerce
Most of today's ecommerce sites use collaborative filtering to improve sales, cross-,up- and downselling. A prominent example are Amazon's recommendations based on various user behaviours on their website.

Music/Radio
Tapping into our musical tastes Last FM, Genielab or Pandora present us with streaming music. Here the main business model lies in linking to the respective ecommerce sites like Apple's iTunes.

Books
The same applies to the area of what we might want to read next which also serves ecommerce purposes.

Movies and more
MovieLens is a free service provided by GroupLens Research at the University of Minnesota. Whether, you want to book a hotel, whole vacation there are numerous examples of collaborative filtering apps on websites.

Pictures
The most prominent example for sharing, managing and searching for pictures is Flickr or myspace. The latter gaining revenues from online-ads.

Search engines
As I have elaborated in an earlier entry on google bombs the network structure (ties) play an important role in search engine algorithms.

Knowledge Base and OpenSource
The online encyclopedia Wikipedia builds on the power of decentralized, voluntary collaboration building an enourmous depository of multi-language information. Whether it was the development of Linux, Mozilla/Firefox or MySQL all rely on and consist of social networks. Further examples of openSource projects can be found at Sourceforge.

SNA Consulting
As we can see the character and concepts of networks is mainly utilized for recommendations. Actual applications of SNA is done by a few companies and consultants like Rob Cross, IBM, Orgnet or Visiblepath. These companies try to uncover the informal networks within organisations to improve knowledge sharing, initiate change or bridging silos.

Finally, you can always follow latest trends in social network analysis at PNG's subpage on SNA by Ines Mergel.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 11:15 AM | Permalink

During a recent presentation at the University of Tokyo I discussed the social affordances of email. I defined social affordances as the social opportunities and constraints provided by technology. (If you want to read more about this topic, see my co-authored paper : "The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism," in Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 8, 3.) After I listed a number of email’s social affordances, one of the audience members pointed out that those affordances only apply to PC based email. By contrast, there exists a substantially different set of affordances for mobile phone based email. Given that my research is only about the use of email in America, my lack of attention to mobile phone email was intentional. There are not enough Americans using this technology for it to be relevant to my current research. Nevertheless, this comment got me thinking about the difficultly of making cross-national generalizations about the social uses of particular technologies. For example, even though the use of PC email is almost as common in Japan as it is in America, the wide-spread use of mobile phone email in Japan may change how the Japanese use PC email.

Continue reading "The Social Affordances of Email in Japan and America" »

Posted by Jeff Boase at 4:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've spent this last week working on a paper with Kakuko Miyata and Barry Wellman. The paper uses longitudinal survey data collected in Japan to understand the causal relationship between the use of keitai (internet enabled mobile phones) and the reception of social support. This is one of the first opportunities that I've had to write a paper based on longitudinal data, and I'm thoroughly enjoying the experience. In addition to providing me with an understanding of the causal relationship between the technology and social behavior, the data is also allowing me to chart the adoption of a new technology, as it has become integrated into lives a general public. This experience has made me wonder about the extent to which the adoption of keitai is the result of a social network structure that is more prevalent in Japan than in countries. My hope is that more longitudinal studies of this nature will be conducted in different countries, so that I might someday better understand the extent to which adoption patterns are the result of differences in network structure, vs. other factors, such as culture, marketing, or investment in technological infrastructure.

Posted by Jeff Boase at 8:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

In my entry on Google bombs on 11/19/2005 I raised the following question:

"How will governments react to such movements of altering the search results in an unfavorable way in the future as knowledge becomes more important? How will search engine providers react? The easiest way to approach this would be to influence or enforce rules on search engine vendors. Hence, we could ask whether search engine providers need to be kept as autonomous as central banks with respect to knowledge?"

Well, as of 1/25/2006 we got an answer to this when reports on Google's self-censored search engine for China came out. However, as a other reports show, censorship also exists in other countries like Germany or France for certain terms. So in fact there is a need to watch developments in this regard carefully...What do you think or propose?

Related articles:
Harvard Law School, Berkman Center for Internet & Society
NY Times on Google and China search engine version
Wired on Google and their geolocations on searches

Continue reading "Follow up: Google bombs and the autonomy of search engine vendors" »

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 5:00 AM | Permalink

I'm happy to announce the release of a report that I wrote with Barry Wellman and the Pew Internet & American Life Project titled, "The Strength of Internet Ties.�?

Disputing concerns that heavy use of the internet might diminish people’s social relations, the report shows that the internet fits seamlessly with Americans’ in-person and phone encounters. With the help of the internet, people are able to maintain active contact with sizable social networks, even though many of the people in those networks do not live close to them.
The report highlights how email supplements, rather than replaces, the communication people have with others in their network.

The report "The Strength of Internet Ties" is available as PDF.

A BBC news story about the report is available online at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4644666.stm

Posted by Jeff Boase at 12:46 PM | Permalink

The crawlers of Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engine providers are automatically indexing the web. All of the web? No not all of it, just the surface which consists of billions of documents like HTML pages or directly linked file of any kind (i.e. mp3, PDF, doc, zip...). If we use complex search strings we are also able to plunge a little into the grey matter below the surface web (SW). Many documents are not directly linked but are still indexed.

The deep Web (DW), is web data that resides in databases and is only dynamically available in response to queries (i.e. you do a search on a specific website, login or load a website). It is supposedly much bigger and provides more valuable data than the surface web.

Continue reading "What do we really see? - The deep and the surface web" »

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 11:38 AM | Permalink

Typing in "Failure" as a keyword and regardless of pressing "Search" or "I am feeling lucky" this links directly to the biography of US President George Bush. Some time ago the same happened when someone typed in "weapons of mass destruction". This is a "google bomb". Furthermore, it is indirectly an example of global network building and collective action of website owners and bloggers based on a common idea or opinion.

What is a google bomb?
The term "Google bomb" basically describes a misapplication of knowledge on the Google's search algorithms and results. Let's take the example of "failure". The US President's biography website is neither about failure nor is the word failure used in the content. However, other websites linked the word failure to his website so it is not a political expression by google or its employees. Without going into much detail this mainly relates to some basic principles of the Google search logic and page ranking:

1. Links are essential to determine the rank/importance of a page
2. The page weight/importance (i.e. a university > personal website)
3. Topicality (How often a website is updated)
4. Other aspects related to web or blog content

Voice Option and Collective Action
Blogs and their links seem to play an increasingly important role as they are acting as millions of voters on webcontent or on various real world issues and events. In the desrcibed case this is a worldwide opposition on the policies of US President George Bush, probably mostly related to the war and occupation of Iraq. Drawing on Hirschman's (1970) work on exit, voice and loyality we can indeed identify this as a new and emerging form of use of the voice option. Furthermore, the movement itself is an example of collective action and social network building. "Google bombs" also strengthen Wellmans (1996) argument that computer networks help forming social networks. Links, comments and emails could replace Feinberg&Johnson's (1977, 1988, 1990) physical ("milling") form of consensus building among crowds. However, this has yet to be proven. The question remains how people globally agreed on the term and adding the link to their website/blog. Was it supported by media reports? Pitcher et al (1978) , McAdam (1983) argued that protest activity first catches regimes off guard, and thus diffuses because of its success, and then is brought under control by social and other control mechanisms.

This raises some interesting questions: What can the internet community achieve with this form of voice? How will governments react to such movements of altering the search results in an unfavorable way in the future as knowledge becomes more important? How will search engine providers react? The easiest way to approach this would be to influence or enforce rules on search engine vendors. Hence, we could ask whether search engine providers need to be kept as autonomous as central banks with respect to knowledge? Further questions on "Deconstructing Google bombs: A breach of symbolic power or just a goofy prank" are raised by Clifford Tautum.

Knowledge is one of the key challenges of the 21st century. Knowledge creation and knowledge transfer will become one of the key questions to resolve. Thus, I would like to raise the attention of researchers to this emerging trend.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 12:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)