Boardtracker adds AuthorLine visualizations to threaded discussion search service

18MayMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

Boardtracker is a search engine and reporting service for threaded discussions. Recently, the BoardTracker folks implemented a visualization of author activity overtime that was inspired by work Fernanda Viegas and I did in 2003/2004 called “AuthorLines”.

AuthorLine visualizations represent the weekly rates and nature of contribution from a single author over the span of a year. Each vertical strip of bubbles represents the activity of that author in a week. The 52 strips of bubbles in these images represent a year of contribution history. If users reply to threads other users initiate, they get blue bubbles that sit below a middle dividing line. Each thread to which they contribute in that week is represented as a separate bubble. Each additional message contributed to that thread in that week adds to the size and transparency of the bubble. If the author initiates new threads, they get a red bubble that sits above the line.

The results is an “at-a-glance” view of the pattern of participation for a year in the life of a threaded conversation message contributor. The two images below illustrate just how different contributors can be in their patterns of engagement in a threaded conversation environment. This image represents a contributor of mostly reply messages who starts a small amount of thread initiation at the end of the year but who contributes significantly more to threads started by others. They have a habit of engaging in lengthy discussions, adding dozens of messages to one or more threads almost every week of the year.

http://www.boardtracker.com/cgi-bin/display_member.pl?board=4202&member=524613

Contrast this image with the distinct pattern created by this author who heavily initiates new threads while responding to those started by others more modestly until the pattern inverts at the ned of the year where they shift to a more heavy reply rather than initiation pattern.

http://premium.boardtracker.com/cgi-bin/display_member.pl?board=4202&member=501671

The paper that described the early work on these visualizations can be found in the HICSS 2004 conference:

Viégas, Fernanda B., Marc Smith. “Newsgroup Crowds and AuthorLines: Visualizing the Activity of Individuals in Conversational Cyberspaces“, Proceedings of Hawaii International Conference on Software and Systems (HICSS) 2004. [Best Paper: Persistent Conversation Minitrack]

A related paper applies these visualizations to document the range of variation found in social media spaces built around threaded discussions.

Tammara Turner, Marc Smith, Danyel Fisher and Howard Ted Welser, Picturing Usenet: Mapping computer-mediated collective action. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 2005. [Local copy]

[Thanks to BoardTracker CEO Ron Kass for these images!]

Mapping connections among twitter users who tweet CRM, SCRM, and Social Graph

18MayMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

CRM, SCRM, and the social graph are all hot topics. This is a map (a social graph) of connections among recent twitter users who tweeted the term “social graph”

This is a list of the top “betweeness” contributors in that map: these are the people who most “bridge” different parts of the network.

This is a map of connections among recent twitter users who tweeted the term “crm”: the color indicates how “between” of “bridge-like” that person is – blue is low betweenness and red is high.

This is a map of connections among recent twitter users who tweeted the term “social crm”:

These social graphs are present in a wide range of social media and can be extracted and analyzed using the techniques of social network analysis and visualization.

In each graph image, the general size and structure of the population related to that term is made visible. These images can also be represented as lists in a spreadsheet that can rank participants by their various network attributes (like centrality, degree or the density of the participant’s local network).

The result is a snapshot of a several days of activity that reveals key participants in hub and bridge positions. These people and their tweets may be more “influential” than other, more peripheral, contributors.

The X/Y space in these images is not where the meaning is encoded: rather it is the structure of the collections of connections that tell the story. In these images the size and density of different topics can be inferred from comparisons between images: “social graph” is far less dense than “social crm” (which is a bit of a surprise). The spreadsheet of metrics is an alternate view of the network properties of each participant, allowing rank ordering by degree or various centralities. Even in the dense network visualizations it is often possible to identify hubs as well as sub-clusters that indicate separate populations engaged in discussion around the same topics. In other images (see: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/4588091932/) these clusters are very visible. The absence of them indicates a more uniform population.

Contrasting “climate change” and “global warming” twitter maps with NodeXL

07MayMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

Building on the earlier post about the twitter network maps for topics like “oil spill“, “bp“, and “solar“, here is a map of the terms “climate change” and “global warming”. This first map is of the connections among the people who recently tweeted the term “climate change”. There is a sizable population of isolates, people who tweet the term without connection to anyone else who tweets the same term. These are likely to be the casually engaged people who mention the topic but do not engage many others in a conversation or exchange. The graph is dominated by the giant component that contains prominent general and specialist political news media.

In contrast, this is the map of the term “global warming” with many more isolated tweets and two major clusters in the giant component, a group of global warming deniers and a smaller group of with scientific affiliations and content.

May 21st, 2010: Social Graph Symposium

07MayMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

On May 21st, I will speak at the Social Graph Symposium in Mountain View, California along with Sharad Goel – Research Scientist at Yahoo and DJ Patil – Chief Scientist at LinkedIn.

The Social Graph Symposium brings together academics, experts, influencers, executives, and other prominent figures with an interest in social graphs. The event is centered around the social graph and its implications for business, technology, and the community.

Discussions this year will center around:

State of the Social Graph
Latest Social Graph Research
Activism
Advertising
Influencer and Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Marketing
Retail
Search
Social Gaming

Here is a map of recent connections among twitter users who mention the term “Social Graph”:

Visualizing the connections among twitter users who tweet “oil spill” with NodeXL

06MayMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

The oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is a topic of great concern to many people in twitter.

This is the map of connections among people who tweeted the term “oil spill”. There are lots of isolated authors, people who tweeted “oil spill” but are not connected to anyone else who said the same phrase. The “giant component” is relatively sparse, there is no dense core of “oil spill” people yet. This is in contrast with many topics where a large, highly interconnected cluster of people defines the “center” of the discussion. This term remains highly diffuse.

This is the map of connections among people who tweeted the term “BP”.

The BP map also has a large population of isolates, people who are not part of a “BP” related conversation but have said the term. A small core of highly interconnected users is forming in the “BP” hashtag space but in contrast to a term like “solar”, there is still little cohesion and density in its core.

This is the map of connections among people who tweeted the term “solar”.

This is a topic with a more dense core of highly interconnected Twitter users who share the use of the string “solar” in their tweets. Ranks of isolates are also present in this topic space but the giant component is more internall connected and cohesive.

May 12, 2010: Princeton Club of Northern California – Silicon Valley Luncheon: Making Meaningful Maps of Social Media Networks

03MayJuly 13, 2016 By Marc Smith

I will be speaking at the Princeton Club of Northern California on May 12, 2010.

Event

Date

Time

Location

RSVP

Silicon Valley Luncheon: Making Meaningful Maps of Social Media Networks

5/12

12-1:30

Palo Alto

Krim Stephenson’97

As more and more of our lives take place online, we leave behind ever more data about ourselves and our relationships with others. Technical advances are making lasting changes in both our relationships and our concept of privacy. As more and more of our personal and professional interactions take place in digital spaces, we leave behind ever more data about ourselves and our relationships with others. That data can be used to generate “social maps” that visually depict patterns of contribution and connection between individuals, yielding results that are often powerful and surprising. What do social maps like this tell us, and how can they help us understand and improve our organizations? What are the social and ethical issues raised when employers, insurers, and the government can track whom we associate with, and use that data to predict our actions?

In this talk, sociologist Marc Smith, Chief Social Scientist for Connected Action Consulting Group (http://www.connectedaction.net/), a provider of social media analysis platforms and services, will describe and demonstrate these new technologies and some ways of thinking about their implications. Marc Smith is a member of the team that developed NodeXL, a tool for tracking and visualizing social data, and the co-author along with Ben Shneiderman and Derek Hansen of the upcoming book Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world.

Registration fee includes lunch.

Date:	Wednesday 5/12
Time:	12-1:30
Location:	Offices of Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati, Palo Alto
Address:	650 Page Mill Road
Contact:	Krim Stephenson ’97 415 730-5746

Event: Maker Faire 2009

30MayMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

I attended the Maker Faire down the hill in San Mateo at the County Fair Grounds.

The event is the gathering of the many forms of craft, tinkering, building, mashup, hacking, and experimental communities.

Here are some photos from today’s event.

[flickrset id=”72157618944488325″ thumbnail=”square” overlay=”true” size=”medium”]

My highlights: the full sized replicas of TV and movie robots from Lost in Space and Forbidden Planet; the littlebits snap together circuits, the LED bicycle wheel displays, the Telsa coils (of course), the flame throwers (of course), and the rolling metal ball robots.

It was a well attended event with many great displays.

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

22MarMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

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.