Connected Action

After speaking at the Israel Internet Association conference February 22, I will speak at IBM Research in Haifa at an event co-sponsored by the University of Haifa Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the M.A. program in Sociology of Technology.  My hosts are Professor Gustavo Mesch from the university and Dr. Adam Perer from IBM [...]

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Facebook recently announced its fellowship program for graduate students pursuing a PhD. Winners will receive tuition, fees, and a stipend for the 2010-2011 academic year. Anyone interested in applying should move quickly, as the deadlines are quite tight in order to ensure that we can provide funding for the upcoming year.
The fellowship is designed to [...]

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Here is a recent slidedeck that provides an overview of NodeXL and social media network analysis.
2009 December NodeXL Overview
View more presentations from Marc Smith.

The deck illustrates the use of NodeXL to extract several social media networks from systems like twitter and facebook to generate maps of communities and identify people and objects in key locations.

Share [...]

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My colleagues on the Facebook Data Team recently posted the results of a study about the diversity of the Facebook user base.

Using surnames from users in the United States and comparing the rates at which those surnames occur in several ethnic populations, they were able to estimate the proportion of Facebook users within different populations [...]

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NodeXL has had a rudimentary flickr tag network data spigot for some time but we have just added a number of features to this data importer that makes it much more useful.
You can now select the number of network levels to include, an optional sample image file can be included for each tag, and the [...]

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Starting in version 100 NodeXL has added a data import feature for extracting social networks from the associations between users and videos in YouTube.  The new social media network data spigot offers insights into the ways YouTube is socially structured.  This spigot joins the existing twitter, flickr, and email data import providers present in NodeXL. [...]

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On December 15th in Mountain View, California join me for lunch and a workshop on creating social media network diagrams!  We will provide a hands-on guide to creating maps of the collections of connections among people who tweet about various brands, topics, events, and concepts. Bring your own Windows/Office 2007 machine and we will set you [...]

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This is a brief demo video about NodeXL analyzing Twitter social network connections among a group of users who all mentioned the term “digg”.

2009 – November – NodeXL – Demo – Mapping Twitter Social Networks “Digg” from Marc Smith on Vimeo.
This is a good demonstration of several features in NodeXL: social media network importers (in [...]

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Version 95 of NodeXL is hot off the compiler and we are pleased to announce several major features that create a social media network analysis dashboard.  From the NodeXL interface it is now possible to import networks from twitter, flickr, email, and a range of social network file formats.  Coming soon: support for more spigots [...]

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Here is a great piece of social media research from the University of Maryland, College of Information Studies.
Prof. Jen Golbeck and Justin Grimes analyzed 6,000 tweets from United States Congress members.  They found some interaction but a dominant broadcast pattern of use with a focus on self-promotion.  The Washington Post headlines the results as “Tweeting Their [...]

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A recent paper makes use of NodeXL to create illustrations of data from connections among twitter users drawn from the United States presidential debates in October 2008.  One illustration highlights the major clusters in the network.

Tweet the Debates: Understanding Community Annotation of Uncollected Sources

Authors: Shamma, D.A.; Kennedy, L.; Churchill, E.F.
Source: ACM Multimedia, ACM, [...]

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My colleague at the Oxford Internet Institute, Bernie Hogan, is working on tools that collect personal Facebook network data and visualize the connections among your friends.
Here is an example: http://twitpic.com/9rvfq

It provides a good illustration of the ways a person’s social network is clumped into clusters built around life phases, workplaces, educational institutions, teams and locations.  [...]

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The Communities and Technologies conference is holding its 4th meeting in Penn State June 24-27.  This conference gathers a range of scholars interested in online community, social media, social networks, and mobile social software.  A paper “Analyzing (Social Media) Networks with NodeXL” has been accepted for publication in the conference!  Congrats to my co-authors!

Paper Title: Analyzing [...]

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There is some very positive coverage of Telligent recently in the press.  First there is the very detailed review of the community platform and its reporting features from Barb Mosher at CMS Wire: “Social Web Analytics with Telligent’s Harvest Reporting Server“.  The article does a great job of detailing the features of the Harvest social [...]

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[Vladimir Barash is liveblogging the ICWSM conference]
9-10AM: A Tempest: Or, on the Flood of Interest in Sentiment Analysis, Opinion Mining, and the Computational Treatment of Subjective Language (Lillian Lee)
-Sentiment analysis using discussion structure: clasify speeches in US congressional floor debates as supporting or opposing proposed legislation -Individual doc classifier -agreement (degree) classifier for pairs of [...]

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