Complexity and Social Networks Blog

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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)