On June 22nd in New York City Wired Magazine and the Economist hosted a day of discussions and displays related to the theme of “Nextwork” hosted by Juniper Networks and located at the Tribeca Rooftop.

The Social Media Research Foundation displayed and printed  Nextwork Networks maps of the connections among the people who tweeted about the conference, the speakers, and their companies.

Visit the NextWork Network booth hosted by the Social Media Research Foundation to see a map of the connections among people who tweeted the term “NextWork“.  Networks are important data structures but the tools to access, analyze and visualize networks have been hard to use.  New tools now make networks as easy to handle as making a pie chart.  NodeXL, the free and open network overview, discovery and exploration add-in for the familiar Excel spreadsheet, makes creating network diagrams and gaining insights much simpler (see: http://nodexl.codeplex.com).  Using NodeXL, we have been collecting all the tweets that mention the NextWork event and building a network map of the ways those people connect to one another.  Not everyone is equally connected: some people occupy more strategic locations in the web of connections than others.   Find out who: request your own NodeXL social media network map for your Twitter account or the name of your company or brand (or your competitors) by dropping by the booth (or visit: http://www.smrfoundation.org/nextwork2011).

Here is an example, a map of the connections among the people who recently tweeted the name “Kevin Kelly”, one of the speakers at the event:

This is a map of the connections among the people who tweeted the term “Nextwork”: