My colleague, Eduarda Mendes-Rodriguez, recently demoed NodeXL at the Microsoft EU Innovation Day event in Brussels, Belgium.  She illustrates the value of network analysis in general with a social network diagram representing the voting patterns of United States Senators in 2007.  The results show the clear party-line clustering and the presence of a few fence sitters, one of whomn just recently changed party.  I think the difference between the two party’s internal cohesion is an interesting observation as well.  

 

Eduarda does a great job demonstrating the ease with which a sophisticated analysis can be implemented via the NodeXL interface.

NodeXL is about to cross 8,000 downloads and has several releases in the works to add better tools for laying out a social network diagram.