How We Know Us

Month: July 2008

  • Newspapers: Don’t Give Up Yet!

    Dan Gilmore: Newspapers have at least two more huge opportunities. First is to open the archives, with permalinks on every story in the database. Newspapers hold more of their communities’ histories and all other media put together, yet they hoard it behind a paywall that produces pathetic revenues and keeps people in the communities from…

  • Response: Is social media becoming a vast wasteland?

    Shel Israel penned a great article with an unfortunate quote from writer and blogger Ashok Banker about his retreat from social media, There shouldn’t be writers and fans. We’re all writers on such platforms and should be all equal. The moment there are writers and ‘names,’ it’s a failure of the system. I’m sorry but…

  • Visualize Your Network with Fidg’t

    figd’t screenshot There are more and more great tools getting developed for visualizing our social networks. One of the more beautiful ones I have come across is Fidg’t.  While not quite a SN visualization tool, it does operate on data from SN’s. Fidg’t is an interactive display that looks at your tags in Flickr and…

  • Wrestling with FriendSpam?

    Please Facebook: give us filtering! There has been a lot of talk lately about the increasing and sometimes overwhelming amount of data we are exposed to daily.  [Google: information-overload] What happens when it’s from your friends? I have several hundred friends across the social networks I use, and even with the short updates SN’s usually…

  • Sales Teams need Social Networks

    Effective use of social networks (SN’s) is closer to sales than it is to marketing.  You want to build momentum in the network, and marketing alone will not provide that. There’s a lot more to SN’s than better demographics, and given the abysmal value advertisers are are placing on Facebook (suggested $0.32 CPM vs. $1.15…

  • Social Networks and Sales

    From eponymous Social Network data alone, I can tell you who has, for any group, the most influence, who the leaders are, and who you need to convince in order to turn the opinion of the group as a whole. The question is are you going to be a trusted adviser, or a hard sell?…

  • The Never Ending Quest for Data

    Finding good data in this field is difficult, even most of the academic literature references relatively small networks of less than 100 or so individuals. I suggest that the academic research is just starting to take off now (although the field is very far from new), because of availability of large real world datasets available…

  • Friendship: #1 factor in whom we spend time with

    Like all good science, analyzing social networks sometimes works out to proving things we always thought were true. Sometimes, we never even had any idea how right we were. For example, we really do spend more time with people we like. A few really bright folks from MIT and the Kennedy School, have a paper…

  • Great Work, Lousy Title

    Good news, from Roland Piquepaille over at ZDNet… According to Nature News, a team of French researchers has used medieval documents to create the oldest detailed social network ever constructed. The mathematicians and computer scientists looked through thousands of records of land transactions dating back as far as 1260 in a Southwest part of France.…

  • Playing with Circos

    Martin Krzywinski at the Genome Sciences Centre of the BC Cancer Agency, created software called Circos designed to help elucidate the interaction of genes, and has used it to create some truly beautiful graphs. The software is pretty complex, and I have only figured out how to use his simple on-line version, which limits the…