The March/April issue of MIT Tech Review has an interesting article, “Between Friends: Sites Like Facebook Are Proving The Value of the Social Graph” (nods to Nathan Gilliat and Matthew Hurst -whose work is cited- for breaking this on their blogs).
Overall, this article provides some great examples of how sociograms - social network graphs - [...]

Given the heavy debate regarding our 2008 presidential election, I thought it would be fun to generate some semantic networks regarding the fore-runners as discussed on Twitter. The first (click for full view) focuses on “tweets” including John McCain.
Some quick context to help read the first graph:

The branch to the right (red) focuses on [...]

Online ethnographic research is finally getting some signficant academic attention. I believe I have a little perspective on the subject; I have co-authored a chapter on the subject of “electronic ethnography” in two editions of an anthropology textbook, “Doing Cultural Anthropology” (M. Angrosino, ed.). In preparing for an edition update, I had collected some [...]

I was discussing social media analytics with one of my best friends, who is the CIO of a fund management / investment company. I had familiarized him with companies like Collective Intellect, and his response was both interesting and representative of reactions I’ve gotten from others in the investment and banking communities.
He found the [...]

A recent article came out in Forbes.com, “Is the Tipping Point Toast?” tackling popular assumptions about the role of influencers and opinion leaders in dissemination and adoption, particularly in the area of online/viral media. The article focuses on recent work by Duncan Watts (a physicist that has gained popular recognition for his publications on [...]

I am a board member of the Tampa Bay chapter of the National Defense Industry Association (NDIA), and have had many contacts with the defense industry going back 13 years or so to my prior job. Lately, I’ve had many conversations around the topic of social media and the US Dept. of Defense. [...]

Several months ago, I saw a brief clip wherein some researchers were developing new technology for mining videos; in the clip, experimental software was automatically parsing through video files to identify objects, symbols and people. The software could annotate the video with comments such as “red car moving from left to right at 3:05:20 [...]

Nathan Gilliat, one of my favorite bloggers on the topic of social media intelligence, recently posted a great discussion on Combining Social Media and Traditional Research.  Social media analytics - “buzz” trending, sentiment analysis, semantic analysis, profiling - are still very new technologies that have a long way to go before their results will [...]

Social media analytics provide some promising new research tools and techniques, but they are not without their respective strengths and weaknesses. Some of their well-recognized weaknesses include:

Lack of error and confidence estimates. In fact, most social media analytics are quite short on even descriptive statistics that might be taken for granted from a [...]

A team of researchers at MIT has produced some technology that has interesting implications for real-time, primary research.  They’ve developed some almost-affordable “badges” that are packed with sensors such as IR proximity detectors and accelerometers (motion and speed detectors). A timely MIT Tech Review article gives a very nice introduction to the technology and [...]