I was building some improvements into my desktop text analysis software “Thoth” this weekend, and thought it was a good time to review my options for generating publication-quality network diagrams from the output. I’ve written my own tools in the past for generating a variety of network graph layouts (force-directed, kamada kawai, layered hierarchical, [...]

You’ve heard the term “scalability”. Scalability refers to the capacity of a site or service to grow exponentially. Before this term became popular in tech circles, however, it was documented in social network research.
Drs. Duncan Watts and Albert-Laszlo Barabasi literally wrote the book on the subject of the dynamics of scalability (Dr. Barabasi [...]

I’ve been playing around with Twitter.com’s new social graph functions in their API, and for a quick experiment pulled the network formed by all twitterers with 30,000 or more followers (the “twitterati” elite).  When I get a chance to do some more in-depth network analysis, I’ll follow up to this post, but here’s a quick [...]

A few weeks ago, I spent a long day throwing together a new Twitter application, “twinfluence.com“.  In about 8-10 hours coding PHP and MySQL with the Twitter API, I launched the site in time to present it at a BarCamp.  The primary idea behind it was that simply counting followers was an insufficient way to [...]

OK, I have to post about a growing pet peeve.  I’m a very, very small lone voice against the vast and growing trend of referring to online social networking applications / platforms (MySpace, FaceBook, white label platforms, etc.) as “social networks”.  While social networking applications contain, and are a type of human social network, “social [...]

Last February, I posted about an automated sensor/logger device by researchers at MIT for the purpose of automated real-time discovery of human social networks. As interesting as that device is - and the implications for smaller, cheaper successor devices - I believe that the trend toward increasing computing power, location sensitivity, and “friend discovery” [...]

The concepts of “betweenness centrality” and “structural holes” are some of the most powerful in the social network analysis toolset (pun intended - but forgive me for lumping the two concepts together for this post). In a nutshell, high betweenness indicates that the overall network is disproportionally reliant on an individual for [...]

PC Magazine published a February 27 article “The Online Hunt for Terrorists.” It focuses on the work of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Arizona, and in particular their Dark Web project. In my recent post “Military Social Media Intelligence“, I categorized part of the US military effort in social media [...]

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 - [...]

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 [...]