Podcast: Social Media Clarity E04 – Social Media Influence is a Graph

30SepMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

Episode 4 of the Social Media Clarity podcast has just been released.

In this episode host Randy Farmer (@frandallfarmer) and I talk about how to think about social media influence in terms of a social network. Networks can be measured and a variety of patterns can be found in them that indicate the role or pattern of connections a person has.

We talk about why influence is not a single attribute, it is a more complex function of a person’s position within a web of relationships.

People play different roles in social media networks, we talk about three: hubs, bridges and islands. Each plays a different role in a social media network. Each has a different kind of influence.

Once these different roles are measured, people can be ranked in terms of their similarity to one or the other pattern. Highly ranked people can be influential” in terms of their different locations in a network.

In a related blog post, I suggest possible strategies for using network insights to drive a social media campaign: identify key people and their content to guide targeted relationship building. See:

How to build a collection of influential followers in Twitter using social network analysis and NodeXL

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October 2, 2013: Washington, DC NodeXL Meetup – Join us for an afternoon of social media network analysis

22SepMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

NodeXL users in the Washington DC area are welcome to join a free users group meetup on October 2, 2013 at 2pm.

There will be a morning session at the University of Maryland (9-11) and an afternoon session downtown.

If you’d like to attend, please complete this form.

I hope to see you there!

Social Media Clarity Podcast – E03 – Real Names for Social Order? Guest: Dr. Bernie Hogan (@blurky)

16SepMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

The Social Media Clarity Podcast has just released a new episode:

Save our Pseudonyms! Social Media Clarity S01E03

This is the “Real Names for Social Order?” episode, featuring guest sociologist: Dr. Bernie Hogan (@blurky) from the Oxford Internet Institute speaking with host Randy Farmer (@frandallfarmer) along with me & Bryce Glass (@bryceglass).

Building on the second episode which focused on the changes at the Huffington Post’s comment posting policy, in episode 3 we talk with Bernie Hogan who explains why sociologists are concerned by “context collapse” – the loss of the ability to be different people for different people – caused by social media. Sociological research suggests this is not a positive thing because humans have always maintained different roles for different groups of people and not all roles are commensurate. While time and place once kept separate roles separate, today the net makes any interaction into every interaction.

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September 26-27, 2013: NodeXL Social Media Network Analysis Workshop at the Universidad Externado, Bogota, Colombia

15SepMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

September 26-27, 2013 at the Universidad Externado, Bogota, Colombia

I will participate in a workshop on social media network analysis at the Universidad Externado, Bogota, Colombia on September 26-27, 2013.

My host is Professor Hernando Rojas from the University of Wisconsin and the Universidad Externado.

Here is a map of the connections among the people who recently tweeted UExternado:

Video: Webinar on Data Visualization and NodeXL, hosted by SoftArtisans

12SepMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

I spoke in a webinar on Data Visualization and NodeXL hosted by SoftArtisans and now available on Vimeo.

Thanks to Claire and Elise!

September 20, 2013 – NodeXL Workshop at the University of Texas, Austin School of Journalism

30AugMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

On September 20, 2013 I will participate in a workshop on social media network analysis at the Community, Journalism & Communication Research Center at the School of Journalism in the College of Communication at the University of Texas – Austin

The event will start Friday at 11:00AM at the BELO CENTER FOR NEW MEDIA. Bring data, questions and a copy of NodeXL for hands-on assistance.

The workshop will focus on the application of social network analysis to social media and the content exchanged through it.

The graph represents a network of 780 Twitter users whose recent tweets contained “@utaustin”, taken from a data set limited to a maximum of 10,000 tweets. The network was obtained from Twitter on Friday, 30 August 2013 at 18:22 UTC. The tweets in the network were tweeted over the 2-day, 3-hour, 55-minute period from Wednesday, 28 August 2013 at 14:25 UTC to Friday, 30 August 2013 at 18:20 UTC.

Podcast: Social Media Clarity – Talking with Randy Farmer, Bryce Glass and Marc Smith about networks and social media

26AugMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

Your host: Randy Farmer, with Bryce Glass and Marc Smith.

The Social Media Clarity podcast has just started with an initial 15 minute show devoted to analysis and advice on social media platforms and product design (http://bit.ly/12Edwvx), moderated by Randy Farmer (@frandallfarmer) and with Bryce Glass (@bryceglass) and myself. We plan to talk about a range of topics related to social media, online community, reputation systems, incentive design, analytics, visualization, and collective participation. I hope you will give a listen to the first show, Randy did a great job getting a quality recording and editing a polished package.

This episode we talk about changing rules for access to the data we all put into the cloud. The discussion is related to this post “Over the edge: Twitter API 1.1 makes “Follows” edges hard to get” – documenting the impact of changes in access to data through social media APIs. The implication from the discussion is that business may need to start building their own social network data sets since they cannot rely on cloud platforms to guarantee their access to their own data.

We plan to produce more episodes, please let us us know what topics you’d like to hear discussed.

NodeXL crosses 200K downloads!

12AugMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

Today is a milestone for the NodeXL project: we have had our 200,000th download:

Thanks to the many contributors and users of NodeXL! We plan to continue to develop and freely release the easiest tool for getting insights from networks.

Recent features include a Graph Database server that can store larger networks, content analysis of the text associated with networks, and automated production of network reports.

October 18, 2013 Kredible.Net NSF workshop at Stanford University – Study of reputation and social roles on social media

06AugMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

This October 18, 2013 an NSF funded workshop called Kredible.Net to be held at Stanford University will bring together researchers studying reputation and social roles in social media.

The workshop will help researchers investigate how social media, especially Wikipedia articles and editors, shape public knowledge. The project aims to build a research community and to propose a research agenda for the study of reputation and authority in informal knowledge markets, such as Wikipedia.

The team is lead by Sorin Adam Matei (PI) of Brian Lamb School of Communication, Elisa Bertino (Cyber Center), Michael Zhu and Chuanhai Liu (Department of Statistics) , and Luo Si (Department of Computer Science).

The KredibleNet project is supported by an international team of researchers including Marc Smith, director of the Social Media Research Foundation and the NodeXL project and by Dr. Luca De Alfaro, from University of California, Santa Cruz, the head of the WikiTrust project. The team also includes researchers Jure Leskovec (Stanford), Bernie Hogan (Oxford Internet Institute), and Ben Shneiderman (University of Maryland).

The KredibleNet grant will fund research and workshops that will reveal how social media leaders gain authority to shape public knowledge.

See: http://kredible.net/in/kredible-net-awarded-nsf-grant-to-study-reputation-and-social-roles-on-social-media/

TedX Bay Area Talk: The Myth of Selective Sharing – Digital Health Futures: Empowerment or coercion?

05AugMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

I spoke about my concerns with the continued belief in selective sharing. I argue at this TedX Bay Area talk that it is unwise to expect that digital information systems are capable of privacy or selective sharing. In other words, it is a dangerous myth to believe in a feature that in practice fails regularly and by design. In fact, it seems that it is practically impossible to create any digital information system that is secure.

In such a world we may want to reconsider our sharing practices, particularly if they were built on the idea of selective sharing. If any of your digital information is something you would rather not share publicly, you may want to rethink the idea that you can keep your information private.

If you are building an information system, you may want to rethink the idea that you can offer selective sharing in a reliable form.