29 June – 2 July 2011
Queensland University of Technology

Tweet with the hashtag #ct2011

http://ct2011.urbaninformatics.net/

C&T 2011 OVERVIEW

The biennial Communities and Technologies (C&T) conference is the premier international forum for stimulating scholarly debate and disseminating research on the complex connections between communities – both physical and virtual – and information and communication technologies.

C&T 2011 welcomes participation from researchers, designers, educators, industry, and students from the many disciplines and perspectives bearing on the interaction between community and technology, including architecture, arts, business, design, economics, education, engineering, ergonomics, information technology, geography, health, humanities, law, media and communication studies, and social sciences. The conference program will include competitively selected, peer-reviewed papers, as well as pre-conference workshops, a doctoral consortium, and invited keynote and panel speakers.

Marcus Foth
Conference Chair

IMPORTANT DATES
30 April 2011: Workshop papers, Doctoral Consortium and Student Volunteer applications due
29 June 2011: Pre-conference workshops and Doctoral Consortium
30 June – 2 July 2011: C&T 2011 conference at QUT, Brisbane, Australia

CONFERENCE TOPICS

C&T 2011 welcomes contributions in all areas of community and technology research, design and development. In addition, we particularly invite authors to address any of the following topics:

Augmented Reality
Civic Intelligence
Context and Location Awareness
Community-centred Design and Evaluation Methodologies
Community Engagement
E-research with Communities
E-government and E-governance
Participation
Smart Community Services
Sustainability
Universal Usability and Accessibility
Urban Informatics
Tangible Interfaces for Community Interaction
Technologies of Scale Making
Visualisation Techniques
Working across Cultures

http://ct2011.urbaninformatics.net/

#ct2011

NodeXL allows collections of vertices in a network to be gathered together into a “Group”.  Groups have several properties:

• groups can be selected
• vertices in selected groups can be operated on as a set
• groups can be collapsed or expanded
• network metrics can be calculated for each group
• groups can be plotted within bounded regions

NodeXL supports creating clusters or groups of vertices in several ways:  by attribute or manually, by component, or algorithmically.

Group menu commands are located in the Groups Menu in the NodeXL>Analysis Menu section.

Group menu commands include:

Group by Vertex Attribute

Users can also assign vertices to groups based on any attribute in the vertex worksheet.

The NodeXL>Analysis>Groups>Group by Vertex Attribute allows groups of vertices to be defined by any attribute.

These attributes can be numeric, or categorical:

Groups can also be authored manually.  A group is created whenever a new row is populated in the Groups worksheet.  A vertex is assigned to a group when it is named with its group in the Group Vertices worksheet.

Find Connected Components:

Each component can be assigned to its own group using the NodeXL>Analysis>Groups>Find Connected Components option.

Find Clusters – Automated Group Assignment Algorithms:

NodeXL exposes three of the clustering algorithms from the Stanford Network Analysis Platform (SNAP) (http://snap.stanford.edu) library for calculating network metrics from graphs. Working with SNAP author and Stanford Computer Science Professor Jure Leskovec, the NodeXL team integrated three clustering algorithms which can be selected from Cluster>Options:

the Wakita and Tsurumi “Finding Community Structure in Mega-scale SocialNetworks“ algorithm, the Girvan-Newman or Clauset-Newman-Moore algorithm.  When these Group findings algorithms are run each vertex is assigned to one of a set of groups based on its decision rules.  In general, these algorithms try to place collectons of densely connected vertices into separate groups or clusters.

I. Introduction

Introduction to Communities in Cyberspace, Peter Kollock and Marc Smith

“Since 1993, computer networks have grabbed enormous public attention. The major news and entertainment media have been filled with stories about the “information superhighway” and of the financial and political fortunes to be made on it. Computer sales continue to rise and more and more people are getting connected to “the Net”. Computer networks, once an obscure and arcane set of technologies used by a small elite, are now widely used and the subject of political debate, public interest, and popular culture. The “information superhighway” competes with a collection of metaphors that attempt to label and define these technologies. Others, like “cyberspace,” “the Net,” “online,” and “the web,” highlight different aspects of network technology and its meaning, role and impact. Whichever term is used, it is clear that computer networks allow people to create a range of new social spaces in which to meet and interact with one another.”

More details from the book…

II. Identity

Identity and deception in the virtual community, Judith S. Donath, MIT Media Lab

“Identity plays a key role in virtual communities. In communication, which is the primary activity, knowing the identity of those with whom you communicate is essential for understanding and evaluating an interaction. Yet in the disembodied world of the virtual community, identity is also ambiguous. Many of the basic cues about personality and social role we are accustomed to in the physical world are absent. The goal of this paper is to understand how identity is established in an online community and to examine the effects of identity deception and the conditions that give rise to it.”

Reading Race Online: Discovering Racial Identity in Usenet Discussions, Byron Burkhalter (UCLA, Sociology)

Writing in the Body: Gender (Re)Production in Cyber Interactions, Jodi O’Brien (Seattle University, Sociology)

III Social Order and Control

Hierarchy and Power: Social Control in Cyberspace, Elizabeth Reid (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Communications)

Hierarchies and power on MUDs-the text-based multi-player virtual reality games found on the Internet-rely on the control of players’ abilities to manipulate the virtual environment. Social status on a MUD is linked to a player’s ability to manipulate the virtual components of the system; rewards consist of increased access to such world-manipulating tools. In Power/Knowledge Foucault described an effective form of power as one that enables the powerful to “gain access to the bodies of individuals, to their acts, attitudes and modes of everyday behaviour.” On a MUD, where the physical body is not present, but the virtual body is at the absolute mercy of those who control the system, such power exists. The theatre of authority in a MUD is one which demands and facilitates a strongly dramaturgical element. Underlying each MUD system are cohesive social structures which centre on control and the manipulation of game elements. Every piece of information a player integrates into the MUD universe permits and assures the exercise of power. Speaking and writing-transmitting knowledge-are acts of literal power in the virtual reality of a MUD, and permit the creation of hierarchies of social control.

Problems of Conflict Management in Virtual Communities, Anna DuVal Smith (Case Western Reserve University, School of Management)

This paper explores the sources of conflict and techniques of social control in an open-access, text-based virtual community. It argues that such social systems have the same kinds of opportunities and problems brought by diversity that real communities do, but that unique features of cyberspace make effective conflict management both more important and more difficult. Cases of interpersonal disputes collected during 22 months of participant observation revealed that power strategies of social control were generally counterproductive in managing the conflict that resulted from the multiplicity of values, goals, interests and cultural norms brought by members of the community. As in real life, methods that reconcile divergent interests mediation and factfinding) and adjudicate rights (factfinding and arbitration) appeared to manage issue-based conflicts more effectively. However, their utility and, therefore, the community’s ability to adapt and thrive as an open, goal-directed system depends on member awareness of the program, human resource availability and administration willingness to share power.

IV Community Structure and Dynamics

Net Surfers Don’t Ride Alone: Virtual Communities as Communities, Barry Wellman & Milena Gulia (University of Toronto, Sociology)

Invisible Crowds in Cyberspace: Measuring and Mapping the USENET , Marc Smith (UCLA, Sociology)

The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace, Peter Kollock (UCLA, Sociology)

V Collective Action

The Promise and the Peril of Social Action in Cyberspace: Ethos, Delivery, and the Protests over MarketPlace and the Clipper Chip, Laura J. Gurak (University of Minnesota, Rhetoric)

In April 1990, Lotus Development Corporation announced a product called MarketPlace: Households. MarketPlace was to be a direct mail marketing database for Macintosh computers and would contain name, address, and spending habit information on 120 million individual American consumers. After MarketPlace was announced, computer privacy advocates began investigating the product. Although most of the data contained in MarketPlace was already available (data was provided by Equifax, the second largest credit reporting agency in the United States), privacy advocates felt that MarketPlace went beyond current standards for privacy protection. Having the data so readily available to a mass market of personal computer users extended the existing network of information sources in the US, including credit profiles, grocery store checkout scanning systems, and government files. Furthermore, the data was provided on the non-correctable media of CD-ROM; therefore, if an entry was in error, it could not be corrected. And although Lotus did include certain privacy protection measures when designing the product, privacy advocates were not convinced.

From Lotus’s first announcement until months after it canceled the product, the Internet was full of discussions about MarketPlace; soon, debates about the privacy implications of MarketPlace and suggestions for contacting Lotus began to circulate. People posted Lotus’s address and phone number, the email address of Lotus’s CEO, and also gave information about how to request that names be removed from the database. Some people posted “form letters” that could be sent to Lotus. Notices were forwarded around the Internet, re-posted to other newsgroups, and sent off as email messages. In one case, a discussion group was formed specifically to discuss the product. As a result of the Internet-based protest, over 30,000 people contacted Lotus and asked that their names be removed from the database. The product, which had been scheduled to be released during the third quarter of 1990, was never released. In January 1991, Lotus issued a press release announcing that it would cancel MarketPlace: Households. In the end, many acknowledged the role of networks in stopping the release of MarketPlace. Some subsequently called it “[a] victory for computer populism” (Winner).

Electronic Homesteading on the Rural Frontier: Big Sky Telegraph and its Community, Willard Uncapher (University of Texas at Austin, Communications).

This chapter provides an overview of an ethnography exploring the introduction of a low cost computer mediated conferencing and communication system into the rural Montana one room school system and develops a framework based on the conflicts between the material economy using information technology to organize global economies of scale and an online gift economies and social scale to explore the informatization of rural communities. The paper proposes that we should not limit our analysis of online communities simply to online behavior.

Based on interview, site visits, and an extensive collection of secondary materials, primarily between January 1988 when Big Sky Telegraph first went online, and January 1990, the research provides a case study of the way social, cultural, economic, and pre-existing communication arrangements come to frame the uses of the new technology, even as they are transformed by them. Not all communities are transformed equally, and those users, such as rural teachers and women wanting to change their lives provided a base of new users, while the ranching and farming community was more circumspect. The social differences would impact not only online behavior, but how behavior gets online, and even how the borders between these worlds are imagined.

Cyberspace and Disadvantaged Communities: The Internet as a Tool for Collective Action, Christopher Mele (State University of New York at Buffalo, Sociology)

This chapter recounts the collective action of an organized group of African-American women residents of Jervay Place, a low-income housing development in Wilmington, North Carolina, and their use of online communication to attempt to challenge not only the immediate issue of adequate housing but their position within the unequal power relationship between African-American women and white elite-dominated institutions. In the case of Jervay, collective action emerged in response to the housing authority’s exclusion of residents as agents in the planning for the site’s future. Their efforts at mobilization and resistance and the reactions of the housing authority were particularly embedded in the local and historical context of power and race. Ultimately, in order to challenge the unilateral decisions of the housing authority effectively, resident determined it was necessary to circumvent the local customary (paternalist) forms of interaction that have long existed between disenfranchised African-Americans and local political and social institutions. Use of online communication afforded the women an opportunity to operate outside the local and exclusive pathways of information, discourse and social action controlled by the institution of the housing authority. In a broader sense, their grassroots networking activities online subverted longstanding local articulations of power. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of online communication for mediation of historically unequal relations between disadvantaged groups and social institutions.

]]> http://www.connectedaction.net/2009/12/15/book-communities-in-cyberspace-ten-years-later/feed/ 4 http://www.connectedaction.net/2009/09/12/recently-stanford-media-x-workshop-new-metrics-for-new-media-analytics-for-social-media-and-virtual-worlds/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=recently-stanford-media-x-workshop-new-metrics-for-new-media-analytics-for-social-media-and-virtual-worlds http://www.connectedaction.net/2009/09/12/recently-stanford-media-x-workshop-new-metrics-for-new-media-analytics-for-social-media-and-virtual-worlds/#comments Sat, 12 Sep 2009 11:00:32 +0000 Marc Smith http://www.connectedaction.net/?p=1377

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 Smith
August 5-6

Social media and virtual worlds offer two important frontiers for measuring earned engagement. In both, audiences are actively engaged as participants. This workshop covered foundational concepts in media measurement, describe new frontiers in measuring audience engagement in social media and virtual worlds, and provided hands-on experience in using new analytical tools.

This session also provided a walk through the basic operation of NodeXL, including generation of social networks from social media data sources like personal e-mail (drawing data from the Windows Desktop Search engine) and the Twitter social network micro-blogging system. Arbitrary edge lists (anything that can be pasted into Excel) can be visualized and analyzed in NodeXL. Attendees were encouraged to bring an edge list of interest. Sample data sets were provided.

Video about the New Media for New Metrics Workshop

Agenda WEDNESDAY, August 5: #124 Wallenberg Hall

08.30 – 09.00 – Welcome, Introductions & Overview

Martha Russell, Director, Media-X, Stanford University
Marc Smith, Internet Sociologist, Connected Action Consulting

Martha spoke about the changing media landscape and the need to measure new media in the mix of media consumption measurements.  She suggests that old measures may not always fit new media and that new media offer new opportunities (and challenges) for measurement.  Martha runs the Media-X program at Stanford that ran the workshop.

09.00 – 10.00 – The MEdia Generation (and others): Trends in Media Multitasking in the US and China

Don E. Schultz, Northwestern University Agora-IMC, Inc, BigResearch

Professor Schultz teaches marketing and communication at Northwestern University.  He runs a series of surveys about media consumption in the US and in China.  The results show people consuming multiple media at the same time, but not in the same mix (China uses mobile more than desktop).

10.30 – 11:30 – Panel: Metrics for Management Decisions

Moderator: Martha Russell, Media X at Stanford University

Richard Rommel, Senior VP Emerging Business, Best Buy
Blaine Baggett, Executive Manager, Office of Communication and Education
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA
Louis-David Mangin, GrinShot
Maury Giles, Founder, Pursuit

Richard Rommel (Best Buy) discussed their Twitter strategy and commercials.  Best Buy now features their employees as a service via twitter to all askers and features that in their TV commercials.

JPL in Pasadena is using the web to push the “science is cool” (and fundable) message to all who will listen.  When NASA lands something on Mars its the JPL that gets the huge traffic spike.  They are opening up conversations between researchers and the public and increasing the surface area for science media.

11:30 – 12:00 – Synergies Between Search and Social Metrics

David A. Shamma, Yahoo Research

Ayman spoke about measuring engagement in a Yahoo Messenger video sharing and chat feature.  He found that chat activity spikes during the credits.  Except in Japan where strings of “wwwwwwwwwwwww” denote laughter and continue through out a shared video session.

Ayman also did a study of Twitter usage during last year’s political debates.  He found the chat did not echo the terms used in the debate.  Chat activity also spiked after the debate.

13:00 – 14:00 – Measuring Social Media & Digital WOM

Michael Wu, Chief Scientist, Lithium

Michael presented the ingredients of the Lithium Community Health Index which (pictured) includes the notion of interactivity (speed to reply).

14:00 – 15:00 – Panel: Metrics for Moderating and Managing Communities

Moderator: Marc Smith, Internet Sociologist, Connected Action Consulting

Sameer Patel, Pretzel Logic
Gail Ann Williams, Director of Communities, Salon.com

Gail and Sameer focused on the ways they directly manage communities in a commercial environment.  Gail tuns the community for Salon’s Table Top and Well social spaces.  She runs fee based spaces that require customer retention (but sometimes wish they could selectively apply customer ejection!).

Sameer consults on the selection and use of enterprise social media.  He focused on the metrics his customers want to see in an internal deployment, focused on usage and connection rates among users.

15:15 – 17:00 – Social Network Analysis Tutorial: Part 1
Concepts, Data, & Tools for Producing the Social Graph

Marc Smith, Internet Sociologist, Connected Action Consulting

I showed the slides previously presented at the Catalyst Conference, this time in a longer form at the workshop: http://www.slideshare.net/Marc_A_Smith/2009-catalyst-conference-social-media-research slides focuse on the use of social network and activity analysis to identify key contributors in social media spaces.

17.00 – 17.30 – Discussion: Navigating the Terms in Social Media Metrics

Moderator: Don Schultz

———————————————–
Agenda THURSDAY, August 6: #124 Wallenberg Hall

08.30 – 09.30 – Patterns of Mobile Media Advertising–Taking 3G Portals as an Example

Chunlin Duan, South China University of Technology Profit

Professor Duan is Dean of the School of Communication at South China University of Technology.  She described mobile device usage in China (huge!) and the major focus on IM, chat, and message boards, along with the dominance of QQ and its virtual goods and currency.

09.00 – 09:30 – Cell Phone Usage in Japan for Social Networking and Advertising

Neil Rubens, University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo

When toddlers have cell phones mobile device penetration is high!  Japan is highly mobile (although on its own island of technology) and using social network services via their devices.

09:30 – 10.30 – Panel: Emerging Metrics for Virtual Worlds & Immersive Environments

Moderator: Greg Nuyens, Qwaq Forums
Gene Yoon, Former CFO, Second Life
Parvati Dev, Innovations in Learning
Henrik Bennetsen, Stanford Humanities Lab

Gene Yoon is the former CFO of Second Life, he spoke about the use of metrics in his business.  He focused on engagement as the behavior he wanted to measure.

Parvarti Dev is a former Stanford Professor using virtual reality social worlds to role play emergency room procedures among nurses and doctors.

11:00 – 12:00 – Trends in Metrics for Self Monitoring

Gary Wolf, Sr. Editor, WIRED

Gary is documenting the emerging world of the “Quantified Self” – people using mobile devices with sensors and networks to collect detailed records of their own behavior and medical vital statistics.  These data sets, in aggregate, may reveal new insights for evidence based medicine, self improvement, and public safety.

13:00 – 15:30 – Social Network Analysis Tutorial: Part 2

Concepts, Data, & Tools for Filtering and Decorating the Social Graph

Marc Smith, Internet Sociologist, Connected Action Consulting

A step-by-step guide to creating, analyzing, and visualizing a social network.

16:00 – 16:30 – Discussion and WrapUp: Gleaning Meaning from Measurements

Moderator: Martha Russell

]]> http://www.connectedaction.net/2009/09/12/recently-stanford-media-x-workshop-new-metrics-for-new-media-analytics-for-social-media-and-virtual-worlds/feed/ 0 http://www.connectedaction.net/2009/03/22/conference-2009-international-conference-on-weblogs-and-social-media-in-san-jose/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=conference-2009-international-conference-on-weblogs-and-social-media-in-san-jose http://www.connectedaction.net/2009/03/22/conference-2009-international-conference-on-weblogs-and-social-media-in-san-jose/#comments Mon, 23 Mar 2009 03:54:28 +0000 Marc Smith http://www.connectedaction.net/?p=632

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 attending this year’s meeting in San Jose.  Last year we had a poster paper in the conference about the ways some users in a blog system called Wallop were able to hold other users in the system.

Some Users Pack a Wallop: Measuring the Impact of Core Users on the Participation of Others in Online Social Systems
Thomas M. Lento, Eric Gleave, Marc A. Smith, Howard T. Welser

There was also a paper about the lessons learned from managing large corporate online community efforts.

Space Planning for Online Community
Danyel Fisher, Tammara Combs Turner, Marc A. Smith

This year, we have a poster in the conference that is focused on the ways network structures created when people reply to one another can be used to predict whether a message or thread is a question and answer exchange or a long discussion or debate.

Distinguishing Knowledge vs. Social Capital in Social Media with Roles and Context
Vladimir Barash, Marc Smith, Lise Getoor, Howard Welser

The conference attracts some great people and features the state of the art in research at the intersections of computer science, natural language processing, social network analysis, search engine/information retrieval design, information visualization, knowledge management and the social sciences.  That can be eclectic but this is the place for hearing about new work on Wikis, Blogs, Message Boards, and other social media systems like social networking services, micro-blogging systems, and mobile software.

The conference is held this year in May, from the 17th-20th, in San Jose, California.

Here are my pictures from last year’s ICWSM in 2008, held in Seattle, Washington.

There is also a nice picture from Joe McCarthy of Tom Lento and me in front of our poster at ICWSM 2008.

by gumption

2009 Communities and Technologies Conference

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 groups of people. Today, such terms as virtual community, blogging, podcasting, and smart mobs have become commonplace, yet each represents a complex system of hardware, software, and people, shaped by perceptions, norms, rules, and habits, and occurring within varied social and cultural settings.

The Communities and Technologies biennial international conference serves as a forum for stimulating and disseminating research on the complex connections between communities – both physical and virtual – and information and communication technologies. Researchers studying aspects of this interaction between communities and technologies, regardless of disciplinary background, are providing original contributions to the Fourth International Conference on Communities and Technologies.

http://cct2009.ist.psu.edu/workshops.cfm

http://cct2009.ist.psu.edu/program.cfm

I am please to note that a paper about NodeXL will appear at the Communities and Technologies conference, there will also be a workshop on the use of the tool presented prior to the official start of the conference.

Penn State hosts C&T 2009

Hope to see you there!

Here are some pictures from the prior Communities and Technologies conference in 2007 on the campus of Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan.

Distinguishing social network attributes of online social roles

Three roles are particularly critical, despite their relatively rare occurrence in most threaded discussion environments.  Answer people are the relatively rare people who provide a useful answer to potentially hundreds of question askers; discussion people reply to one another about the topics introduced by the topic starting “reply magnet”.  These roles are visible in the details of the patterns of reply and connection within social media repositories.  The relative balance of these roles (and others) determines the nature of the social media space: is it a discussion space, a flame zone, a Q&A exchange spot, or a place to swap binary files?  The balance of answer people to discussion people is one dimension of variation among social media spaces, for example.

Many of these patterns are described in:

• Welser, Howard T., Eric Gleave, Danyel Fisher, and Marc Smith. 2007. Visualizing the Signatures of Social Roles in Online Discussion Groups. The Journal of Social Structure. 8(2).
• Fisher, D., Smith, M., and Welser, H. You Are Who You Talk To, Proceedings of Hawaii International Conference on Software and Systems (HICSS), January 2006. (Best Paper, Digital Media and Communication Program).

Finding additional roles is an open area of research.  Other roles have been described but now need to be grounded in empricial measures of behavior and connection over time.  How many different roles exist?  What are the defining qualities of these roles?  What balances of roles with one another are necessary for effective collective production of valuable common goods like answers to questions, well written wiki documents, photo archives, social support and other kinds of online assets.

These projects point towards a world in which computers and mobile devices do more than connect us to the network, they will sense the world around us and reason about both our location and who is with us.  Combined with back-end data mining, new mobile sensor studded devices are coming that will alter the nature of social interaction in its last, most analog hold out: face-to-face, co-present interaction.

I want to explore this change in the nature of what the sociologist Erving Goffman referred to as the “interaction order“.  We are living through the early stages of the “electrification of the interaction order”, a time in which the ways we interact with one another is changed dramatically by the availability of mobile social information networks.  Online social networking, content sharing and discussion systems have effects that are multiplied when channeled through a device carried by every person and active in every interaction, however fleeting.  

Imagine going to a business meeting or conference and having Facebook suggest that you link to the people you spent the longest time talking to.  Mobile social computing will add more content to the torrent already generated by “desktop” experiences.  Some projects are already digging into this area: good examples include companies and products like nTag.com, SpotMe.Com, and the many trail and path tracking applications now appearing in the iPhone AppStore.  Scott Counts and I wrote about a location based social networking application that demonstrated many of these features as well as search and matching features that have yet to appear in the first wave of production systems.

A first step in this direction is to focus more on the analytic back-ends that will be needed for the management of all forms of social media repositories.  Community analysis servers that provide a dashboard of community health and activity indicators will be a critical differentiating feature for community hosts, managers, and leading participants.  Successful communities will be those that can cultivate contribution the best while managing conflict at the lowest cost.  Once desktop bound social encounters are channeled through an analytics console more real-world events sensed by mobile devices can be added to the mix.  

I am looking forward to some time to push back and reflect more about these changes while looking around for new ways to explore them.  I will take some time to get my family settled into our new home in California.  I hope to catch up with many people!  I will also be visiting Yale, University of Maryland and Berkely for talks this fall.  I plan to attend the Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium in Redmond (it will be good to be back!) and the Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) in Sonoma.

My old masmith@microsoft.com email address is no longer active, so please contact me at marc.smith.email at gmail.com.  

I look forward to staying in touch with my many friends and colleagues at Microsoft while finding the time now to meet with a wide range of people interested in social media.