Connected Action

Fourth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM-10) We will be liveblogging (when possible) from ICWSM 2010, going on now! Keynote: Bob Kraut, CMU implications for community design -offline theories of socialization helpful, not definitive -online communities can build in good socialization practice -e.g. WP welcoming committee Two Types of Commitments to Groups [...]

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The oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is a topic of great concern to many people in twitter. This is the map of connections among people who tweeted the term “oil spill”.  There are lots of isolated authors, people who tweeted “oil spill” but are not connected to anyone else who said the [...]

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or ? Are social media sites data banks, secure repositories of personal assets, or data pimps, soliciting intimate exposure for profit? I think these services need to choose.  I notice that the setting for who can see what in various systems is in flux.  I can set something to private today and may have to reset [...]

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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.  These tools now interoperate with NodeXL through the GraphML XML file format. Here is the new link: http://namegen.oii.ox.ac.uk/fb/downloadNet.php?type=graphml Here is an example: http://twitpic.com/9rvfq It provides a good illustration of the [...]

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There are hundreds of conferences sponsored by the ACM on almost every topic related to computing.  In some cases the same person will publish a paper in more than one conference, creating a tie between them.  Below is a network map application that displays a collection of ACM conferences connected by this authorship tie: http://bosch.informatik.rwth-aachen.de:5080/AERCS/Networks.jsp [...]

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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 [...]

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When the late Peter Kollock and I published Communities in Cyberspace with Routledge in 1999 there were few broadband connections, no iPhones, and little WiFi.  Today, there is an ebook version of the book and Amazon sells a version for the Kindle, a device it was hard to even imagine when the book was written.  [...]

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Here is the Call for Papers for the Fourth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM-10) May 23-26, 2010 George Washington University, Washington, DC Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence IMPORTANT DATES: Tutorial Proposals: December 1, 2009 Paper Submission: January 8, 2010 Poster/Demo Submission: January 8, 2010 Paper Acceptance: [...]

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Next week I will be attending and discussing mobile social media and social networks at the Mobile Web Africa conference in Johannesburg, South Africa. It is my first time to Africa and I am excited to both visit and to discuss how mobile networked devices can change social organizations.  Mobile devices are in many ways more [...]

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This weekend is the Social Computing 2009 conference in Vancouver, B.C.  It is a gathering of many people doing research on social media useage.  Many papers are about tagging systems, blogs, wikis, message boards, and social networking services. Along with several co-authors, I contributed to three papers in this year’s conference: First Steps to Netviz [...]

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A new book E-Research: Transformation in Scholarly Practice edited by Nicholas W. Jankowski on the ways social science research is being changed by the rise of social media has just been released by Routledge.  My colleagues and I contributed a chapter on the ways that information visualization of social media is a useful technique to [...]

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My colleagues Derek Hansen and Ben Shneiderman (University of Maryland) and I have just finished the second version of our tutorial/manual for the NodeXL social network analysis toolkit for Excel. The latest version of the tutorial Analyzing Social Media Networks: Learning by Doing with NodeXL is now available from the University of Maryland Center for [...]

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Derek Hansen (University of Maryland) and I will be running a workshop as part of the Communities and Technologies conference next week in University Park, PA. We have room for additional participants. If anyone is interested, please email me (marc.smith@telligent.com) or Derek (shakmatt@gmail.com). If there is sufficient interest by those in the DC or Bay [...]

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The recent 2009 ICWSM conference featured research into the nature of a wide range of social media. Some highlights: An Examination of Language Use in Online Dating Profiles Meenakshi Nagarajan, Marti Hearst Event Detection and Tracking in Social Streams Hassan Sayyadi, Matthew Hurst, Alexey Maykov Gephi: An Open Source Software for Exploring and Manipulating Networks [...]

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[Vladimir Barash is liveblogging the ICWSM conference] 10.30am A categorical model for discovering latent structure in social annotations (Said Kashoob) Given a collection of web objects, users and tags, can we model the underlying tag generation process? -Discover implict communities of interest? -Categories of related tags? -For given category, id most relevant objs for category [...]

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