Connected Action

Answer people and discussion people are critical to many social media spaces.  Many hosts of communities want to attract and retain them.  When these types of participants contribute to a social media space the results can be very positive: questions asked are answered, topics introduced are discussed.  But not all participants make a positive contribution, [...]

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I had an interesting discussion with Deborah Grove about the ways social media impacts the costs of computing and the efforts to “green” IT by making servers and networks more power efficient.  Social media is a growing segment of all the data stored and processed on earth.  But social media has different properties than previous [...]

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Participants in social media are not all the same.  People who contribute to social media come in “flavors” that are created by each participant’s patterns of activity and connection.  In the post “Distinguishing social network attributes of online social roles ” some of the social network features of different participants are illustrated.  Participants vary in [...]

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CALL FOR PAPERS INTERACT 2009 – Research and Practice The twelfth IFIP conference on Human-Computer Interaction 24 – 28 August 2009 in Uppsala, Sweden Conference website: www.INTERACT2009.org Paper submission site: https://www.softconf.com/s08/interact2009/ ————————————- CALL FOR PAPERS ————————————- The theme of the INTERACT 2009 conference, ‘Research and Practice’, addresses the issue of continuity between theory and practice [...]

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Here are a few of the major stakeholders that gather around any social media effort.  Each role can be further divided into sub roles who specialize in particular kinds of behavior like starting discussions, arguments, or answering questions. Each stakeholder has information needs that are related but somewhat different from other stakeholders.  Building effective social media systems requires delivering [...]

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International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM) 2008 Some dimensions of social media Marc Smith Talk reviews sociological concepts of social media and visualizations of computer-mediated collective behavior. Slides: 2008 – ICWSM – Marc Smith – Some Dimensions Of Social Media View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: telligent marc)

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I love this paper from Lada A. Adamic, Jun Zhang, Eytan Bakshy and Mark Ackerman at WWW2008: Knowledge sharing and Yahoo Answers: Everyone knows something In particular, this image (figure 4) is a great use of an innovative way of handling large network graphs: chop them into a matrix of ego-net thumbnails. This is a [...]

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Many of my colleagues and I have applied social network analysis to Internet social media.  Email, mail lists, wikis, blogs, newsgroups, web boards, photo sharing systems and social networking services all create “network” structures.  In several papers we documented the ways that contributors in discussion groups in Usenet and similar threaded discussion repositories had distinct [...]

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March 10-14, 2009 is the INSNA (International Network for Social Network Analysts) “Sunbelt” conference in San Diego (http://insna.org/). On Wednesday, March 11th 8:30am – noon I will present a workshop on: Using NodeXL for Social Network Analysis (Excel) NodeXL is an add-in for Office 2007 that provides social network diagram and analysis tools in the [...]

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I will be presenting an overview of social media visualization soon at the conference on Visualization and Data Analysis 2009 in San Jose, January 19th,2009  (http://vw.indiana.edu/vda2009/) 9:30 am: Invited Presentation: Visualizing Roles in Social Media, Marc A. Smith, Chief Social Scientist for the Telligent Corporation (http://www.telligent.com) Abstract: Social media systems on the Internet allow for [...]

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NodeXL is an effort to bring network analysis tools to a larger audience by leveraging the power of a spreadsheet to make common data import and manipulation tasks easier. Most data analysis tasks with NodeXL follow a common set of steps: Import Merge duplicate edges (if appropriate) Calculate (some or all) network metrics Create clusters [...]

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Thanks to inspiration from Adam Perer, here is a Wordle.net picture of some of feedback text — a rough presentation of the ideas, topics and research goals submitted by a collection of attendees of a recent lecture on NodeXL at Harvard.  A recording of the slides and audio from the talk is available from the [...]

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I am pleased to announce the return of our network overview, discovery and exploration add-in for Excel 2007 now called NodeXL. Please visit http://www.codeplex.com/nodexl for the add-in and the source code for the application. Key features in NodeXL: > Import data from existing spreadsheets and other network analysis application file formats > Import data from email reply networks [...]

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