Connected Action

Sociology and the Internet, Social Media, and Mobile Social Software

Book: Communities in Cyberspace – Ten Years Later

December 15th, 2009 · 4 Comments

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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Tags: Book · Collective Action · Common Goods · Community · Data Mining · Measuring social media · Metrics · Research · Social Media · Social Roles · Sociology

Recently, Stanford Media X Workshop – New Metrics for New Media: Analytics for Social Media and Virtual Worlds

September 12th, 2009 · No Comments

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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Tags: Community · Measuring social media · Metrics · NodeXL · Social Interaction · Social network · Sociology · Talks · Visualization

Conference: 2009 International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media in San Jose

March 22nd, 2009 · No Comments

Another conference focused on research on blogs and other forms of social media is “ICWSM” – the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.  I was able to attend the previous meeting of this conference last March in Seattle and give a talk about different classifications of social media and I am looking forward to [...]

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Tags: Community · Conference · Data Mining · Industry · Papers · Research · Social Media · Talks

Conference: Communities and Technologies 2009 – Penn State!

March 18th, 2009 · No Comments

A great conference on social aspects of technology is coming up soon:

C&T 2009
June 25-27, 2009
The Pennsylvania State University
Information Sciences and Technology Building
In an increasingly networked world, the concept of community has taken on new meanings and inspired the development of a wide range of technologies aimed at forging connections, improving communication, and enabling coordination among [...]

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Tags: Conference · Interdisciplinary · Mobile Social Software · Multi-disciplinary · Papers · Research · Social Media · Social network · Sociology · Talks · Technology · Visualization

Social Media stakeholders: community roles

December 21st, 2008 · No Comments

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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Tags: Community · Research · Social Media · Sociology

Distinguishing social network attributes of online social roles

December 20th, 2008 · 2 Comments

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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Tags: Community · Social network · Sociology

Farewell to Microsoft after ten great years

September 29th, 2008 · 5 Comments

After ten years at Microsoft Research I have decided it is time to move on.  My time at MSR has been a remarkable one.  I have had the opportunity to work with very smart and focused people intent on making technical strides on many defining aspects of computing.  It has been a pleasure to work [...]

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Tags: Mobile Devices · Mobile Social Software · Research · Shameless self-promotion · Social Media · Sociology · Visualization