Social networks and more

Official Google Reader Blog: Upcoming changes to Reader: a new look, new Google...

2011-10-28T04:12:00.000+02:00

Official Google Reader Blog: Upcoming changes to Reader: a new look, new Google...: Posted by Alan Green, Software Engineer In the next week, we’ll be making some highly requested changes to Google Reader. First, we’re goi...

Using Zemanta with Blogger

2010-07-23T07:44:00.000+02:00

This is new for me. I'm trying out Zemanta. It should help me writing a blogpost. Zemanta is a plug-in for Blogger (or other blogging tools). How does it do that? Well see there video on www.zemanta.com.
This is a picture from the Zemanta Recommendations window on the right side of the edit window.

Next you can link to related articles. Just click an article in the window on the right side and it appears in your post. See below.

Look For Trust, Not Influence

2010-07-19T21:14:00.000+02:00

Look For Trust, Not Influence

http://poptech.org/popcasts/james_fowler_power_of_networks

2010-07-04T14:09:00.000+02:00

http://poptech.org/popcasts/james_fowler_power_of_networks

Customer Think | Social Network Analysis for Improved Collaboration

2010-06-20T19:55:00.000+02:00

Customer Think | Social Network Analysis for Improved Collaboration

How to Set Up OpenID on Your Own Domain

2010-06-20T19:38:00.000+02:00

How to Set Up OpenID on Your Own Domain: "

For some reason I was under the mistaken impression that setting up an OpenID on my own domain, ginatrapani.org, would be a big hassle: that I'd have to host my own OpenID server software and that it would take all sorts of installation and maintenance BS to do so. I feel strongly about owning my identity online, mapping it to my nameplate domain, and actively choosing an authorizing party instead of just accepting the sign-in service du jour like Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, or Google. Still, I never got set up with OpenID on ginatrapani.org because my perceived hassle factor was daunting. Instead, I used idproxy.net for my OpenID and put the domain setup on my 'someday I have to do that' list. It meant that my OpenID was ginatrapani.idproxy.net instead of my own domain. Idproxy is a great service and I thank them for getting me started with OpenID; but still, I want my OpenID URL to be a domain name I own and control.

Turns out I was dead wrong about the hassle. Setting up OpenID capabilities on your own domain name is a two-lines-of-HTML affair, and it's finally done. (Thanks to Chris Messina for bringing me into the year 2006.) If you're interested in doing the same, here's what to know.

First, Google Profiles (and, it turns out, idproxy.net and ClaimID and a bunch of other OpenID providers) can work with your domain name, so all I have to do is add a few <link rel> tags to your HTML to get things set up. Second, you can specify multiple OpenID providers, so if idproxy.net was down or Google Profiles was down, you can have a provider fallback. Sweet. Now, in the <head> tags of ginatrapani.org you will find the following:


<link rel="openid2.provider" href="https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/ud?source=profiles" >
<link rel="openid2.local_id" href="http://www.google.com/profiles/ginatrapani" >

That sets Google Profiles as the authorizing party for my OpenID, but my OpenID URL is ginatrapani.org. You can see my new OpenID in action right here; I signed into this very site with my new OpenID and posted a comment.

I'm not sure yet how to set Idproxy as my 'fallback' provider just yet; if you know how to do that, post it up in the comments.

Thanks to the folks in this Stack Overflow thread for clearing up how to use Google Profiles as an OpenID provider and to Chris for a great discussion of OpenID, OAuth, and verifying identity on the web.

The Alps last week

2010-05-16T22:48:00.000+02:00

The alps last week, still with snow.

Nicholas Christakis: The hidden influence of social networks | Video on TED.com

2010-05-16T16:37:00.000+02:00

Nicholas Christakis: The hidden influence of social networks | Video on TED.com

Book in progress: “Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a Connected World”

2010-05-07T20:00:00.000+02:00

Book in progress: “Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a Connected World”: "

Along with Professors Ben Shneiderman (Computer Science/Human Computer Interaction Lab) and Derek Hansen (College of Information Studies) from the University of Maryland I am writing and editing a book about analyzing the social media networks that form whenever people link or reply to one another, favorite, rate, read, or edit data about other people or their objects. Social media networks can be analyzed using the methods of social network analysis, the mathematical application of graph and network theory to the social sciences. Using social network analysis collections of connections can be analyzed and compared to identify key people and groups and measure changes over time and following interventions.

I am pleased to announce that we have signed with Elsevier/ Morgan Kaufmann to produce a book: Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a Connected World for a Summer 2010 delivery!

A map of the relationships among the population of people who all tweet a particular keyword can lead to the discovery of the key hubs and influential people in the network. A social network analysis of reply patterns in email collections displays clusters around projects and highlights key people and relationships. Visualizing the connections among your friends in Facebook can reveal the various life stages and communities in which you have participated. When you chart the links between videos and users in YouTube content with interesting network properties is exposed based on well connected content creators and influential commentators. A graph of the individual connections between flickr users illustrates the emergent formation of groups around social networks, locations, and topics.

These kinds of social media network data collection, scrubbing, analysis, and display tasks have historically required a remarkable collection of tools and skills. A great example of the variety of tools that can be used in concert to extract, analyze and display social media networks can be found on Drew Conway’s blog. This is a powerful set of tools for those who can master the demands of python and API interfaces. In contrast, the approach the NodeXL project has taken is to provide an end-user GUI application environment built within the framework of Excel 2007 for performing basic social media network analysis and visualization for non-programmers. The python path is certainly the high road for experts and those with demanding volumes or esoteric data requirements. But for the non-coding user, NodeXL may be one of the easiest ways to both manipulate network graphs and get graphs from a variety of social media sources.

There are already some materials available to guide new users interested in learning about NodeXL, social networks, and social media. A video tutorial for NodeXL demonstrates the extraction of the network of people in twitter who mentioned the term “digg”. A tutorial guide to NodeXL offers a step by step guide to features in the NodeXL toolkit (with supporting data sets). But the book will capture the theory, history, domain and process of social media network analysis in a single volume.

The volume contains a broad introduction to social media, social networks and the operation of the NodeXL application and then features a series of chapters from leading researchers that focus on a particular social media system (email, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, flickr, Wikis, the WWW hyperlink network) and the networks each contains (replies, friends, follows, subscribes, comments, favorites, edits, links, etc). A final chapter outlines a programmer’s view of the NodeXL code, in contrast to the code-free approach of the remainder of the book.

Our intended audience is the mostly non-programming population that is interested in social media and the techniques of social network analysis. The volume is largely in the form of a how-to guide that readers can follow and replicate all examples. Using your own free and open copy of NodeXL, you will be able to use sample data sets or create similar live queries that map relationships in social media systems.

We have an ambitious production schedule so the book may be on a book store shelf or online retailer search result in summer 2010.

Table of contents…

1. Introduction

2. Social media

3. Social Network Analysis

4. Hands on SNA: Learning by doing – Network Layout

5. Hands on SNA: Learning by doing – Network Metrics

6. Hands on SNA: Learning by doing – Network Filtering

7. Hands on SNA: Learning by doing – Network Clustering

8. Email

9. Lists, message boards, and communities

10. Twitter: Scott Golder and Vladimir Barash,Cornell University

11. Facebook: Bernie Hogan, Oxford Internet Institute

12. WWW: Robert Ackland, Australian National University

13. flickr: Eduarda Mendes-Rodriguez and Natasa Milic-Frayling, University of Porto and Microsoft Research, Cambridge

14. YouTube: Jen Golbeck and Dana Rotman, University of Maryland

15. Wikipedia: Ted Welser, Patrick Underwood, Dan Cosley, Derek Hansen, and Laura Black, Ohio University, Cornell University, and University of Maryland

16. NodeXL for programmers: Tony Capone, Microsoft Research

Share and Enjoy:

"

SNAP

2010-05-05T12:53:00.000+02:00

SNAP, Stanford Network Analysis Platform.

Also available trough NodeXL.

A library for general purpose social network analysis with data, publications and tutorials.

Eddi: Interactive Topic-based Twitter Browsing

2010-04-27T20:53:00.000+02:00

A new way using twitter search. Very nice demo from MIT.

Sociaal kapitaal als startpunt voor organisatievernieuwing

2010-04-27T11:16:00.000+02:00

Sociaal kapitaal als startpunt voor organisatievernieuwing

"Networked" Web Extra: video and Web-exclusive sidebars on network science | Harvard Magazine

2010-04-26T19:42:00.000+02:00

"Networked" Web Extra: video and Web-exclusive sidebars on network science | Harvard Magazine

Customer Think | Social Network Analysis [SNA] is NOT Social Media Analytics [SMA].

2010-04-15T22:13:00.000+02:00

Customer Think | Social Network Analysis [SNA] is NOT Social Media Analytics [SMA].

The different questions answered with SNA and with SMA

The Future of Twitter’s Platform [INTERVIEW]

2010-04-15T22:09:00.000+02:00

The Future of Twitter’s Platform [INTERVIEW]: "

Twitter has stolen the spotlight in the last week. It started off with the launch of a Twitter-built BlackBerry App and then escalated with the acquisition of Tweetie and the launch of Twitter’s ad platform.

Now the spotlight is shining brightly at Twitter’s Chirp conference in San Francisco. Yesterday, Twitter’s Director of Platform Ryan Sarver announced on stage three new features for users and developers: Places, User Streams and Annotations.

I sat down with Sarver to discuss these new Twitter features and how they will affect users. We also discussed the state of the Twitter developer ecosystem and how the company intends to grow and expand while appeasing third-party developers in the process.

The Three New Features

First, we discussed the core philosophy underlying the recent changes at Twitter. As Ryan told me, the company is maturing and asked itself at the beginning of the year, “what are we going to do when we grow up?” The answer is: Grow the platform while enabling developers to do more unique things with it.

The first new feature we discussed is Places, also known as Points of Interest. This new feature, Ryan explained to me, is not like Foursquare or Gowalla, where users check in. Instead, developers will be able to attach location-based metadata and use it to enhance their products.

Here’s an example: Say you tweet from a park. Twitter’s new Places feature will recognize your location and then allow you to access relevant metadata, including the ability to see other tweets from that location and who those tweets are coming from. Places is less like a Foursquare competitor and more like a subset of another new feature rolling out later this year, Annotations.

Annotations, which launches next quarter, allows developers to attach little pieces of metadata to tweets. This could be anything from location to tags to notes. Sarver believes that the feature will be huge, but that the company shouldn’t decide what data should be attached or how people use that data. Those decisions, he said, are up to developers.

The final new feature announced today is User Streams, which will make Twitter apps real-time. Instead of waiting for API calls every few minutes to update your TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop applications, updates to your Twitter stream will appear in real-time in your apps. Ryan Sarver says that this feature has really changed how he is using Twitter — in fact, he tweeted about it last night as a teaser for Chirp.

The State of the Developer Ecosystem

One of the big stories coming out of last week’s Tweetie acquisition and the launch of the BlackBerry app has been developer uneasiness. Now that Tweetie has become a free application and been renamed “Twitter for iPhone,” other Twitter iPhone apps have been left out in the cold.

I asked Ryan about this very issue, specifically why it happened and how it could be prevented from occurring again. His biggest takeaway from the fiasco: Twitter has to give more cues and provide more information about what’s going to happen on the platform. He wants to provide information on the things “you can count on for the next three months.” However, the company believes that they can’t provide accurate guidance beyond that time frame.

Mashable’s Social Media & Tech Reporter Jolie O’Dell dug a little further, asking Ryan about how he planned to quell the tension between developers and Twitter. His response was straightforward: There is always some tension between platforms and apps, but they need to work together in order to best serve users.

He pointed to what CEO Evan Williams said earlier in the day: The company needs to do things that will grow the entire platform. This, in turn, will benefit all users and thus developers.

For more social media coverage, follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook

Reviews: Facebook, Foursquare, Gowalla, Seesmic Desktop, TweetDeck, Twitter, tweetie

Tags: Chirp, interview, ryan sarver, twitter

Customer Think | Lawyers and Social Media: a Powerful Force

2010-04-15T22:07:00.000+02:00

Customer Think | Lawyers and Social Media: a Powerful Force

How Lawyers benefit from social media.

Making money off Twitter: The Ellerdale Project offers enterprise-scale search and analysis at 600 tweets per second

2010-04-13T22:32:00.000+02:00

Making money off Twitter: The Ellerdale Project offers enterprise-scale search and analysis at 600 tweets per second: "

Twitter’s announcement of an in-house advertising service on Monday night has changed the perceived viability of startups like Scoopler and Collecta that had hooked up to Twitter’s firehose of tweets in hopes of serving ads. To make things worse, serial moneymaker Bill Gross has launched his own startup, TweetUp, which is also a play for the pockets of those looking to do marketing and advertising on Twitter.

But there are still ways to make money off Twitter that don’t involve competing for ad budgets. The most built-out attempt is probably The Ellerdale Project, a San Francisco startup launched in 2008 and funded by several angels including Ron Conway and Roger Sippl. Ellerdale’s plan is to host a real-time Twitter search and analysis site that serves as a marketing machine for selling professional services to enterprise customers, the kind who’ll write big checks on a predictable schedule instead of throwing over one penny at a time.

Ellerdale’s core strength is its Twitter index, which can handle the hundreds — soon to be thousands — of tweets per second that Twitter feeds Ellerdale through its “firehose” API. By processing all tweets instead of a statistically relevant example, Ellerdale can promise customers that they won’t miss a thing.

CEO Jens Christensen told me in a phone interview that Ellerdale’s differentiator is its ability to categorize tweets by topic, rather than by keywords. In theory, it can tell a tweet about Internet Explorer from one about a Ford Explorer from one about Dora the Explorer.

Easier said than done, given the small amount of text and metadata available to work with in the average tweet. Indexing much more text-and-link rich Web pages into categories is a lot easier than processing millions of tiny tweets per minute into specific topics.

Does it work? The company’s demo site, trends.ellerdale.com, maintains live Top 10 lists of topics on Twitter: People, Politics, Music, Film, etc. You can watch the lists jiggle every few seconds as they’re updated onscreen. The lists are populist and the links not wildly different from what you’ll find on Google News. Teen singer Justin Bieber is atop several pages right now. The page for funding seems to be playing it too safe, with only a few posts per day being added.

But Ellerdale’s pitch isn’t aimed at general-interest Web searchers. It’s aimed at brand managers who want to keep a thumb on the pulse of their products. It’s aimed at companies that want to know what’s being said about them by every single person on Twitter. Most important as a business, it’s aimed at customers who’ll pay a fee for reliable, always-on, customized information — the kind Twitter hasn’t proven able to provide. Ellerdale doesn’t get to have a Fail Whale.

Companies: The Ellerdale Project

People: Jens Christensen

The Fed CIO Looks To The Cloud - Should You? | CIO - Blogs and Discussion

2010-04-13T20:58:00.000+02:00

The Fed CIO Looks To The Cloud - Should You? | CIO - Blogs and Discussion

Posted using ShareThis

SNA and social media

2010-04-11T22:54:00.000+02:00

HOW TO MEASURE YOUR TWITTER BRAND

Communities en hoe hiermee omgaan

2010-04-09T18:19:00.000+02:00

Veel organisatie hebben moeite met het zich presenteren op sociale websites (bijv. LinkedIn, Facebook, Hyves).

Belangrijk is te weten wat je als organisatie eigenlijk wilt met sociale websites. Wil je bijvoorbeeld:

reclame maken voor een product of dienst.
een actie organiseren, bijvoorbeeld voor fundraising
een communitie dienen door informatie overdracht te organiseren
etc.

Om te bepalen hoe je gebruik wilt maken van sociale websites moet je drie dingen weten:

Wat is je doel?

Wie is je publiek?

Wat wil je meten?

Lees verder in de volgende blog (Engels).

How Businesses can Harness the Power of Online Communities

Hidden Influencers & Social Networks: Interview with Valdis Krebs

2010-02-26T17:39:00.000+01:00

Interview with Valdis Krebs about influence, Social capital and social networks. By Angela Dunn

Another look at pharma's Twitter presence

2010-02-26T09:15:00.000+01:00

A beautiful analysis of twitter keywords by dynamia.ch
trackback link

The Slow Death of a Social Network

2010-02-24T21:29:00.000+01:00

Interesting article by Om Malik.

A few weeks ago, when News Corp’s digital chief, Jon Miller, fired MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta and replaced him with Co-presidents Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn, I decided it was time to write the social networking site’s epitaph. The recent exodus of executives and technical talent has only bolstered my belief that MySpace is nothing more than a carcass of its former self. In fact, it’s been rotting away for the past few years, as these charts illustrate. ...

2009 Social Network Analysis - Social Network Demographics - Social Network Geographic Data | Ignite Social Media

2009-11-27T16:10:00.001+01:00

2009 Social Network Analysis - Social Network Demographics - Social Network Geographic Data | Ignite Social Media

Posted using ShareThis

Modeling H1N1 Flu Outbreak

2009-11-15T21:57:00.000+01:00

Modeling H1N1 Flu Outbreak

Social networks and more

Official Google Reader Blog: Upcoming changes to Reader: a new look, new Google...

Using Zemanta with Blogger

Related articles by Zemanta

Look For Trust, Not Influence

http://poptech.org/popcasts/james_fowler_power_of_networks

Customer Think | Social Network Analysis for Improved Collaboration

How to Set Up OpenID on Your Own Domain

The Alps last week

Nicholas Christakis: The hidden influence of social networks | Video on TED.com

Book in progress: “Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a Connected World”

SNAP

Eddi: Interactive Topic-based Twitter Browsing

Sociaal kapitaal als startpunt voor organisatievernieuwing

"Networked" Web Extra: video and Web-exclusive sidebars on network science | Harvard Magazine

Customer Think | Social Network Analysis [SNA] is NOT Social Media Analytics [SMA].

The Future of Twitter’s Platform [INTERVIEW]

The Three New Features

The State of the Developer Ecosystem

For more social media coverage, follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook

Customer Think | Lawyers and Social Media: a Powerful Force

Making money off Twitter: The Ellerdale Project offers enterprise-scale search and analysis at 600 tweets per second

The Fed CIO Looks To The Cloud - Should You? | CIO - Blogs and Discussion

SNA and social media

HOW TO MEASURE YOUR TWITTER BRAND

Communities en hoe hiermee omgaan

How Businesses can Harness the Power of Online Communities

Hidden Influencers & Social Networks: Interview with Valdis Krebs

Another look at pharma's Twitter presence

The Slow Death of a Social Network

2009 Social Network Analysis - Social Network Demographics - Social Network Geographic Data | Ignite Social Media

Modeling H1N1 Flu Outbreak