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” [...]

Recently, Wired posted an article that demonstrates that the USDOD’s struggle with social media continues unabated - “Air Force Backtracks on Social Network Ban“.
Part of the problem is generational, and part of it is organizational. The generational part is the military is coming to a crash realization that the latest wave of recruits are [...]

Social media analytics providers are offering increasingly sophisticated tracking tools, dashboard systems, and market research report products. I’ve taken several months to familiarize myself with the types and levels of products and services that are out there, and there are more almost every day. However, as I continue to develop proposals and work [...]

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 - [...]

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 [...]