Ben Shneiderman: Methods and Tools for Facilitating Social Participation from User Experience Israel (UXI) on Vimeo.

Nice review of information visualization techniques and some mention of recent work on the NodeXL project.

In this video interview, John and I summarize the themes discussed at the symposium including the political implications of inequality of technology access and the literacy to use it.  John describes his efforts to map the global blogosphere and I describe the ways social media creates social networks that can be extracted and mapped.  What does it take to be a communicator in a digital media environment?  We discuss the privacy rights of public data and the use of data in ethical ways.  Not everyone with a fiber-optic cable and server room operates under ethical guidelines.  Given that digital communication is inherently traceable communication, could it be that not everyone should take the risks of communicating?    Digital communication makes messages more findable and available which is a virtue when you want your message heard widely.  It is getting harder to limit distribution of content to select audiences.  I like to argue that the destiny of all information is to be made public if only because information never becomes less public.

IE University has a YouTube channel with lots of interesting  video (in English and Spanish) related to communication, innovation, and social media.

In March, 2010 I had the pleasure of attending and speaking in Segovia, Spain at the IE University Department of Communication at the symposium on Transnational connections: Challenges and opportunities for communication.

The symposium is organized with Center for Global Communication Studies at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.  I participated in a video interview with several attendees that was created to summarize the themes and topics discussed at the symposium.  The video includes my colleague John Kelly, from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University and Founder of Morningside Analytics, along with Adrian Monck (World Economic Forum), and Shanto Iyengar (Stanford University).

In a shorter segment several people were asked “What makes a good modern communicator”: here is my reply.

Here was John Kelly’s response as well.

More video is available from IE University’s YouTube channel.

Travel Industry Social Media Analysis: United v Delta – How do airline twitter maps compare? from Marc Smith on Vimeo.

The two maps we discuss are: United Airlines:

and Delta Airlines:

United has a large twitter mentioning population and has a bigger main component.  The larger profile photos indicate Twitter authors with many followers.  The large population of isolates or small components at the bottom of both images are people who mention either airline but are not in a conversation or a relationship with someone else who also mentioned these brands.  They are “shouts” about a brand, not conversations.  In contrast the large component in both images are the connected collection of people who talk to people who talk about these brands.  They are committed to the topic in a way the less connected  authors are not.  They know someone who also talks about air travel.

Viewed over time, we can start to assess the ways these brand’s twitter populations are changing.  Are new people moving into central hub positions?  Are people who held those positions drifting away?

A key observation is that some people with relatively few followers occupy highly central positions in the graph.  This suggests that these authors have a location that lends their content attention from other well positioned people.  Popularity is not just about volume of connections, in a social network perspective, importance is also a function of where the person sits within the graph.

NodeXL network of related YouTube videos sharing the term "blend".

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.  We plan to deliver a expanded flickr spigot soon and have been working with others to deliver a hyperlink and wiki network provider in the coming months.  We have an interest in social media network data spigots for other networks data sources like SharePoint, Exchange, and LDAP servers.

There are two types of network that NodeXL can extract from YouTube: video and user networks.

Video networks are collections of related videos linked by a shared string in their title, keywords, description, categories, or author’s username.

The user network returns a set of YouTube user names and the links between them based on users friending and or subscribing to another user.

Each import dialog allows for a number of configurations over the volume and detail of the data set requested.

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 this case from Twitter), the use of a variety of layouts, auto-fill column mappings, and dynamic filters to reveal some important structures, groups and people in the graph.

Here is the source data in a NodeXL workbook: 2009 – November – NodeXL – Twitter Digg 3

Note!  Excel has issues with security and workbooks.  The easiest way to use that file is to open a blank NodeXL template and use the “Import from older workbook ” feature to pull the data into a workbook that your copy of Excel *can* trust.

Dr. Karen Cook, Stanford University

Dr. Toshio Yamagishi, Hokkaido University

Dr. Jodi O’Brien, Seattle University

and myself.

Earlier in the year, in March 2009, many people gathered at De Neve Plaza at UCLA to remember Peter Kollock.

On Monday, September 14th, at 10:30 PST, I met on the phone with Jerry Michalski and other participants for one of his regular weekly Yi-tan conference calls to discuss the scholarship and personal legacy of Peter Kollock.  In this podcast, I spoke about my years of working with Peter to apply the models of collective action dilemmas, common pool resources, cooperation, and conflict to the creation of Internet social institutions and resources. I discussed Peter’s work with his colleague Jodi O’Brien, and the lasting impact of his research into studies of cooperation, collective action, and common goods as well as his impact on students, business, and the field of social science.  Jodi and Peter were colleagues and co-authors for many years, creating a widely used text The Production of Reality: Essays and Readings in Social Psychology as well as several other publications.  I worked with Peter while studying for my Ph.D. at UCLA in Sociology.  Peter and I wrote about the sociology of the Internet together and co-edited a book Communities in Cyberspace.

I will post a few links to some of Peter’s work that has had the most impact on me in upcoming posts.

Listen here!

Eduarda does a great job demonstrating the ease with which a sophisticated analysis can be implemented via the NodeXL interface.

NodeXL is about to cross 8,000 downloads and has several releases in the works to add better tools for laying out a social network diagram.