OpenSecrets.org is offering free access to their collected data about political contributions, and in that vein, I’ve created a network of expenditures by 527’s*. I am looking for a way to make this more detailed for your ease of exploration, so please stay tuned.
*Groups whose primary purpose is to influence elections are exempt from taxation under Section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code. From NP Action.
Friendship, it seems, is more accurately demonstrated than described. We usually don’t do a good job accurately reporting our friendships when questioned. So, here’s a look at a slightly higher measurement of friendship: conversations.
If you squint (or click to enlarge the image) you can find a little yellow dot. That’s me. The connections between dots are conversations that take place within my “hearing” on twitter. With research suggesting people as far as three degrees away from you hold a statistically significant level of influence across varied subjects; don’t you wonder who is influencing you?
Digging around the “archives” I found this image I created of the interrelations of NY residents contributing in the 2007-2008 election cycle.
With a goal of transparency, 
LittleSis.Org has started collecting peer-membership information for public figures of many sorts. Just the stuff made for social graphs!
This is image represents the social networks of the CEOs of the American Wall Street companies, from the info at LittleSis. Red nodes are the CEOs (Thain is included), and green are organizations.
The data is a work in progress, as it only represents a few organizations these folks are involved with; but a work in progress is progress indeed.
P.S. LittleSis: API pretty please!
Flip over at InfoChimps has put together a massive scrape of twitter. While trying to figure out how to process it all, I’ve drawn one day’s scrape* (20-Dec-08). Many thanks to Flip and InfoChimps for the wow work, and doubly so for making publicly available.
Merlin Mann has a large set of public delicious tags, and I thought I’d take a stab at their interrelation. By my measure of centrality, his top 20 are:
Why Merlin Mann you might ask? Well, I like his work, and he has a walloping collection of tags.
Want your tags drawn and quartiled? Leave a comment or drop me a line at erich@howweknowus.com…
Social Network derived from relationships in the news.
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 LastFM, and shows the relationships visually. There’s even a movie of the tool in action.
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.
Makes me wonder why I did not come across it earlier. Oh, right, because they titled the paper Batch kernel SOM and related Laplacian methods for social network analysis. Shame on you French Scientists, don’t hide the good stuff.
