Connected Action

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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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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Professor Elinor Ostrom has been awarded the Nobel prize in Economics for her work on common pool resources (CPRs) and the management of shared resources.  Her work has great relevance for understanding the creation of many public goods on the internet.  She teaches at Indiana University where she is Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political [...]

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The network created by “Who follows who among the people who tweeted “#CHI2010″. Node size is proportional to total tweets. Generated with NodeXL
On October 29th, I will be offering a workshop in Mountain View, California on the application of social network analysis to the measurement of social media.
The workshop will run from 9m to [...]

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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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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 Nirvana
Bonsignore, E.M., [...]

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The 2009 American Sociological Association Annual Meeting was held in San Francisco, California, August 8-11.
The ASA attracts thousands of sociologists, a subsection of whom have  a passion for the study of the Internet and its many forms of social impacts and uses.  The Communications and Information Technology Section of the American Sociological Association [...]

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On August 7, 2009 at the American Sociological Association Group Processes meeting, a memorial for Professor Peter Kollock was held.  Several of Peter’s colleagues were in attendance and spoke about Peter’s life and work.  (Further below are some details about a conference call held on September 14th that focused on Peter’s work and impact.)

Dr. Karen [...]

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On August 5th and 6th I led a workshop with Martha Russell on social network analysis of social media as part of the Stanford Media X Summer Institute on New Metrics for New Media: Analytics for Social Media and Virtual Worlds this Summer.

New Metrics for New Media:  Analytics for Social Media and Virtual Worlds
Organizers:  Martha Russell, Marc [...]

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The Catalyst Conference was July 27-31 in San Diego which gathered many people to discuss new technologies for enterprise computing.
On Wednesday, July 29 at 11:15 a.m. I gave a presentation about the use of social network analysis within the enterprise.

2009 – Social Media Analystics Research and ToolsView more presentations from Marc Smith.
Session Details: Social Network Analysis: A [...]

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2009 – JCMC- Discussion Catalysts – Himelboim, Gleave and Smith

JCMC Article: Discussion Catalysts

My co-authors Eric Gleave, from the University of Washington, Department of Sociology and Itai Himelboim, from the University of Georgia, Department of Communications, are pleased to note the publication of our paper “Discussion catalysts in online political discussions: Content importers and conversation starters“ in [...]

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I just read a new paper from Jennifer Preece and Ben Shneiderman that provides a nice framework for the ways people contribute at different rates to collective projects in general and social media on the Internet in particular.
Preece, Jennifer and Shneiderman, Ben (2009).  The Reader-to-Leader Framework: Motivating Technology-Mediated Social Participation, AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction [...]

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The upcoming Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston June 22-25 features several presentations of possible interest. George Dearing and I will both be on panels and, centrally, there is a presentation from Telligent co-founder Rob Howard about what is new at Telligent Systems:
Enterprise 2.0: Work, Productivity and ROI Today’s ever-changing workforce requires that enterprises tackle an array of [...]

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For those in the Bay Area there is an event next week of particular interest to community managers, platform developers, researchers, marketers, and software developers: at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View on June 10th is the 2009 Online Community Unconference.  This year 300-400 online community and social media professionals will attend with 50-60 collaborative sessions [...]

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I attended the Maker Faire down the hill in San Mateo at the County Fair Grounds.
The event is the gathering of the many forms of craft, tinkering, building, mashup, hacking, and experimental communities.
Here are some photos from today’s event.
My highlights: the full sized replicas of TV and movie robots from Lost in Space and Forbidden [...]

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