Planet Social Media Research

Do you have a naughty feed? Come on, admit it. You deliberately left out the title, or did you put in an empty summary? Maybe you’re the one who doesn’t put in any dates, or perhaps you set the permalink to the home page of your blog. Well – you are a naughty blogger, shame on you!

This is very cool. When Bing recognizes a search for a celeb (of the real space or other varieties), it will provide an answer composed of their Twitter identity and recent tweets. Not yet rolled out for me, but the Bing blog has a screen shot (repeated here).

FaceBook is changing how it manages privacy starting today. After reading last week’s post on the FaceBook blog, More Ways to Share in the Publisher, and a followup note on ReadWriteWeb, A Closer Look at Facebook’s New Privacy Options, I thought I understood: Facebook was sharing more but only for people who have made their profiles public. From the official FaceBook post:

“We’ve received some questions in the comments about default privacy settings for this beta. Nothing has changed with your default privacy settings. The beta is only open to people who already chose to set their profile and status privacy to “Everyone.” For those people, the default for sharing from the Publisher will be the same. If you have your default privacy set to anything else—such as “Friends and Networks” or “Friends Only”—you are not part of this beta.”

But today the New York Times has an article, The Day Facebook Changed: Messages to Become Public by Default that clearly says more is coming (emphasis added):

“By default, all your messages on Facebook will soon be naked visible to the world. The company is starting by rolling out the feature to people who had already set their profiles as public, but it will come to everyone soon. You’ll be able each time you publish a message to change that message’s privacy setting and from that drop down there’s a link to change your default setting.

But most people will not change the setting. Facebook messages are about to be publicly visible. A whole lot of people are going to hate it. When ex-lovers, bosses, moms, stalkers, cops, creeps and others find out what people have been posting on Facebook - the reprimand that “well, you could have changed your default setting” is not going to sit well with people.”

But it will come to everyone soon! That’s a big change if true. I hope that there is come clarification soon from FaceBook. I, for one, am left confused.

In face, as the ReadWrite post notes, the FaceBook privacy policy interface is confusing and not easy to use.

“Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to manage the new privacy settings as they are currently constituted. Several members of our staff struggled to make changes to message-specific and default privacy settings really stick. The feature is confusing if not outright broken. A lot of messages intended for limited distribution are going to be sent out wider than the author intended. That’s not good.”

This is an important thing to get right.

FaceBook is changing how it manages privacy starting today. After reading last week’s post on the FaceBook blog, More Ways to Share in the Publisher, and a followup note on ReadWriteWeb, A Closer Look at Facebook’s New Privacy Options, I thought I understood: Facebook was sharing more but only for people who have made their profiles public. From the official FaceBook post:

“We’ve received some questions in the comments about default privacy settings for this beta. Nothing has changed with your default privacy settings. The beta is only open to people who already chose to set their profile and status privacy to “Everyone.” For those people, the default for sharing from the Publisher will be the same. If you have your default privacy set to anything else—such as “Friends and Networks” or “Friends Only”—you are not part of this beta.”

But the New York Times has an article, The Day Facebook Changed: Messages to Become Public by Default that clearly says more is coming (emphasis added):

“By default, all your messages on Facebook will soon be naked visible to the world. The company is starting by rolling out the feature to people who had already set their profiles as public, but it will come to everyone soon. You’ll be able each time you publish a message to change that message’s privacy setting and from that drop down there’s a link to change your default setting.

But most people will not change the setting. Facebook messages are about to be publicly visible. A whole lot of people are going to hate it. When ex-lovers, bosses, moms, stalkers, cops, creeps and others find out what people have been posting on Facebook - the reprimand that “well, you could have changed your default setting” is not going to sit well with people.”

But it will come to everyone soon! That’s a big change if true. There will be blood.

I hope that there is come clarification soon from FaceBook. I, for one, am left confused.

There's been a lot of coverage of the New York Times story "Keeping News of Kidnapping Off Wikipedia." It's prompted discussion about balancing issues of free speech, safety, and responsibility at the Times and Wikipedia. Within Wikipedia, the discussion has only just begun, but has started off quite constructively as seen in Wikipedian Apoc2400's proposed policy: in the short term, Wikipedia should refrain from spreading information if that information is not widely and reliably sourced, of little public interest, and is "likely to have very severe direct negative consequences."

Today’s Baltimore Sun reports that online social game studio Zynga is opening their first east coast office in Baltimore. Zynga makes games for the iPhone, Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, etc., including the popular Mafia Wars game. The head of this new office will be Brian Reynolds, former CEO and one of the founders of Big Huge Games.

Slightly old news now, but Big Huge Games survived the “sale or close” threat by THQ with its sale to Curt Schilling’s 38 studios at the end of May.

In other (widely published) news, Rockville-based ZeniMax bought industry legend id Software (Doom, Quake, …). Future id games will be published by ZeniMax subsidiary Bethesda Softworks.

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AISL CO-PI Lada Adamic gave a keynote talk at Hypertext’09, the 20th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, held June 29 - July 1 in Trento. Lada’s talk, The Social Hyperlink, covered the influence of social networks on the World Wide Web, peer-to-peer systems, and virtual worlds. You can get her slides here.

The Blog Herald comments on the Free skirmish between Gladwell and Anderson by pointing out

The blog is alive and kicking, if nothing else but because it is hard to pick critics and arguments to pieces in 140 characters or less.

I wrote quite a bit about the book when it was being formulated. Now, I’m looking for the (free) online version but haven’t found it yet. Chris/Wired is known for erring on the side of sensationalism to move units (as is appropriate in the media business), so I wonder what his investment in this new thesis is.

Yesterday, NYTimes finally broke the silence on the kidnapping of David S. Rohde by the Taliban. Turns out, Rohde had escaped, and that the news media finally reported the kidnapping since the publicity on the case would no longer be a bargaining chip for his captors. The NYTimes article showed how keeping this news off of Wikipedia was nearly impossible if it weren't for the coordinated effort of several administrators and Jimbo Wales himself.



WikiDashboard visualized this editing pattern directly. In the figure below, I've highlighted the various edit wars between the anonymous editors (97.106.51.95; 97.106.45.230; and 97.106.52.36, which are believed to be the same person) and some of the administrators such as Rjd0060 and MBisanz and the involvement of a robot XLinkBot. You can also see the huge attention on this article in the last week or so in the visualization.





Check out the editing history and the edit war in detail by reading the edit history.



All of this makes for a great way for us to announce that WikiDashboard now works on the live Wikipedia data again; Thanks to the heroic efforts of Bongwon Suh in my group. He figured out how to execute his SQL query in a quick way on the new DB server.

Should the nations of the world work toward a treaty banning or at least limiting cyberwars? If we don’t, might we fall into an arms race that could be bad for everyone? Would A war in cyberspace be less dangerous for people than traditional wars? Or maybe worse?

John Markoff and Andrew Kramer have an interesting article, U.S. and Russia Differ on a Treaty for Cyberspace in Sunday’s New York Times.

“The United States and Russia are locked in a fundamental dispute over how to counter the growing threat of cyberwar attacks that could wreak havoc on computer systems and the Internet. Both nations agree that cyberspace is an emerging battleground. … But there the agreement ends. Russia favors an international treaty along the lines of those negotiated for chemical weapons and has pushed for that approach at a series of meetings this year and in public statements by a high-ranking official.

    The United States argues that a treaty is unnecessary. It instead advocates improved cooperation among international law enforcement groups. If these groups cooperate to make cyberspace more secure against criminal intrusions, their work will also make cyberspace more secure against military campaigns, American officials say. “We really believe it’s defense, defense, defense,” said the State Department official, who asked not to be identified because authorization had not been given to speak on the record. “They want to constrain offense. We needed to be able to criminalize these horrible 50,000 attacks we were getting a day.”

Russia has some specific proposals that it would like to have considered. But there are complications that arise due to cybercrime and Internet censorship.

“In a speech on March 18, Vladislav P. Sherstyuk, a deputy secretary of the Russian Security Council, a powerful body advising the president on national security, laid out what he described as Russia’s bedrock positions on disarmament in cyberspace. Russia’s proposed treaty would ban a country from secretly embedding malicious codes or circuitry that could be later activated from afar in the event of war. Other Russian proposals include the application of humanitarian laws banning attacks on noncombatants and a ban on deception in operations in cyberspace — an attempt to deal with the challenge of anonymous attacks.

…

But American officials are particularly resistant to agreements that would allow governments to censor the Internet, saying they would provide cover for totalitarian regimes. These officials also worry that a treaty would be ineffective because it can be almost impossible to determine if an Internet attack originated from a government, a hacker loyal to that government, or a rogue acting independently.”

The article makes the interesting revelation that this is not the first time that cyberspace arms control have been discussed between the US and Russia.

“In 1996, at the dawn of commercial cyberspace, American and Russian military delegations met secretly in Moscow to discuss the subject. The American delegation was led by an academic military strategist, and the Russian delegation by a four-star admiral. No agreement emerged from the meeting, which has not previously been reported. Later, the Russian government repeatedly introduced resolutions calling for cyberspace disarmament treaties before the United Nations. The United States consistently opposed the idea.

…

John Arquilla, an expert in military strategy at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., who led the American delegation at the 1996 talks, said he had received almost no interest from within the American military after those initial meetings. “It was a great opportunity lost,” he said.

Charles Arthur writes a piece about the slow demise of the blogosphere. Arthur asserts that bloggers are a fading breed, and that

they've all gone to Facebook, and especially Twitter.

Arthur claims to have come to this conclusion via a mixture of anecdotal evidence, and data provided by Technorati. Let’s do our own experiment to see if the blogosphere is fading. Let’s take a very mundane search term – one that we expect to be a constant background in the sea of celebrity death buzz, hi-tech launches and liver transplants : ‘car repair’. As we can see from the Blogpulse graph, it is pretty stable with a few blips here and there:

Blogpulse plots the percentage of all blog posts on this topic. If the blogosphere were dying, the absolute counts would also be slowly reducing (even if the percentages were staying the same as the graph shows).

On Jan 4th, 0.026 of posts were on the term ‘car repair’. This translates to 142 posts (Blogpulse allows you to click through to see the number of hits). On June 21st, where there were 0.027 % of posts on the term, Blogpulse registers 144 hits. Ok, I don’t really see any slacking off there. What happens when we look at more data points? If we do this for ‘car repair’ and ‘birthday’ we get the results below. Here I’ve normalized the values by the percentage of posts (count/percent - the trend shows values for 1% of all blog posts as an artifact of using percent * 100). To my eyes, this looks pretty flat – there is a very slight downward trend, but it could easily be in the noise.

Was Charles Arthur going for a Wired-esque sensational piece?

This week the BBC had a story about the UK’s cyber security programs, UK ‘has cyber attack capability’, with this video interview with Gordon Brown.

The article leads with this surprising discussion of the UK’s offensive capabilities.

“The UK has the ability to launch cyber attacks but does not use it for industrial espionage like some other countries, minister Lord West has said. He refused to be drawn on whether it was used for military purposes.

…

He told BBC Radio 4’s PM programme the UK faced coordinated Huber attacks “on a regular basis” from other countries including Russia and China. And he confirmed that the British government had approached the Russian and Chinese governments to ask them to stop the attacks. “We have had a dialogue with them in the past and I wouldn’t want to go into what goes on in terms of debate at the moment,” he told the BBC.

…

Pressed on whether Britain used cyber attacks itself, he said: “We do not go and attack other nations to try and find from them their industrial secrets.” But he added: “I think it would be very silly of any nation not to have an ability to use cyber space for the safety and security of its nation.” Pressed further on Britain’s cyber warfare capabilities, he said: “We have an ability to do things and we have got very good and very talented people who have worked on this.”

The article also quotes Lord West, the UK’s first cyber security minister, as saying that they had recruited “a team of former hackers for its new Cyber Security Operations Centre” at GCHQ.

“They had not employed any “ultra, ultra criminals” but needed the expertise of former “naughty boys”, he added. “You need youngsters who are deep into this stuff… If they have been slightly naughty boys, very often they really enjoy stopping other naughty boys,” he said.

In systems that execute inferences via a pipeline of steps, every step is an opportunity for failure. Therefore, it is imperative  that implementers focus attention on the details of every step. For example, in text mining, systems have to

1. Import and parse documents – did you get the title? did you recognize the footers? did you strip out the page numbers?
2. Identify sentences and words – is the document in a latin alphabet language? are there word separations? are you dealing with acronyms? how is your unicode-fu?
3. Provide part of speech tags for the words – is the text an example of the type of data that the POS tagger trained on?
4. Identify entities – are you prepared to identify unusual names like Barack Obama?
5. etc.

I’ve seen a couple of attention to details bugs surface in the past few hours. The first was reported by Danny Sullivan, in which Google (and this is still the case at the time of writing) thinks that Michael Jackson the writer is the most salient person with that name.

The second is visible on WeSmirch, in which the system fails to identify the title of Lisa Marie Presley’s blog, naming it ‘Create Free Blogs & Online Journals on MySpace Blogs’:

Attention to detail will always be a killer feature!

the site, is now online.

Labs cover efforts across Yahoo!, with a theme of both core and applied research:

Yahoo! Labs is pioneering the new sciences underlying the Web. As the center of scientific excellence here at Yahoo!, we deliver both fundamental and applied scientific leadership, publish research and create new technologies that power Yahoo!’s products.

We’re responsible for big inventions—and our goals are nothing short of inventing the future of the Internet and creating the next generation of businesses for Yahoo!.

The labs is head by Prabhakar Raghavan, with a leadership across verticals. The publications page is a good place to start.

The Journal of Web Semantics will publish a special issue on Data Mining and Social Network Analysis for integrating Semantic Web and Web 2.0 in the spring of 2010. The special issue will be edited by Bettina Berendt, Andreas Hotho and Gerd Stumme and initial abstracts for papers must be submitted via the Elsevier EES system by September 21, 2009.

The special issue, invites contributions that show how synergies between Semantic Web and Web 2.0 techniques can be successfully used. Since both communities work on network-like data structures, analysis methods from different fields of research could form a link between those communities. Techniques can be - but are not limited to - social network analysis, graph analysis, machine learning and data mining methods.

Relevant topics include

• ontology learning from Web 2.0 data
• instance extraction from Web 2.0 systems
• analysis of Blogs
• discovering social structures and communities
• predicting trends and user behaviour
• analysis of dynamic networks
• using content of the Web for modelling
• discovering misuse and fraud
• network analysis of social resource sharing systems
• analysis of folksonomies and other Web 2.0 data structures
• analysis of Web 2.0 applications and their data
• deriving profiles from usage
• personalized delivery of news and journals
• Semantic Web personalization
• Semantic Web technologies for recommender systems
• ubiquitous data mining in Web (2.0) environment
• applications

The Journal of Web Semantics will publish a special issue on Data Mining and Social Network Analysis for integrating Semantic Web and Web 2.0 in the spring of 2010. The special issue will be edited by Bettina Berendt, Andreas Hotho and Gerd Stumme and initial abstracts for papers must be submitted via the Elsevier EES system by September 21, 2009.

The special issue, invites contributions that show how synergies between Semantic Web and Web 2.0 techniques can be successfully used. Since both communities work on network-like data structures, analysis methods from different fields of research could form a link between those communities. Techniques can be - but are not limited to - social network analysis, graph analysis, machine learning and data mining methods.

Relevant topics include

• ontology learning from Web 2.0 data
• instance extraction from Web 2.0 systems
• analysis of Blogs
• discovering social structures and communities
• predicting trends and user behaviour
• analysis of dynamic networks
• using content of the Web for modelling
• discovering misuse and fraud
• network analysis of social resource sharing systems
• analysis of folksonomies and other Web 2.0 data structures
• analysis of Web 2.0 applications and their data
• deriving profiles from usage
• personalized delivery of news and journals
• Semantic Web personalization
• Semantic Web technologies for recommender systems
• ubiquitous data mining in Web (2.0) environment
• applications

BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos has broken the 10% barrier, a feat that may have won them the $1M Netflix prize. We’ll know for sure in 30 days.

“June 26, 2009: Today our team submitted our solution to the Netflix Prize, resulting in a score of .8558, which corresponds to an improvement over Netflix Cinematch algorithm of 10.05%. This is the first submission in the competition to break the 10% barrier and sets off a 30 day period where all competitors are invited to submit their best and final solutions.

The prize is the award by Netflix for an open competition that started in October 2006 for the best collaborative filtering algorithm predicting user ratings for films from a database of previous ratings. Today the BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos team submitted an entry that improved on the existing algorithm by 10.05%, exceeding the 10% improvement threshold required of a winner. The team is a collaboration between people from Pragmatic Theory, Commendo, Yahoo and AT&T.

“The Netflix Prize seeks to substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences. Improve it enough and you win one (or more) Prizes. Winning the Netflix Prize improves our ability to connect people to the movies they love.”

BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos has broken the 10% barrier, a feat that may have won them the $1M Netflix prize. We’ll know for sure in 30 days.

“June 26, 2009: Today our team submitted our solution to the Netflix Prize, resulting in a score of .8558, which corresponds to an improvement over Netflix Cinematch algorithm of 10.05%. This is the first submission in the competition to break the 10% barrier and sets off a 30 day period where all competitors are invited to submit their best and final solutions.

The prize is the award by Netflix for an open competition that started in October 2006 for the best collaborative filtering algorithm predicting user ratings for films from a database of previous ratings. Today the BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos team submitted an entry that improved on the existing algorithm by 10.05%, exceeding the 10% improvement threshold required of a winner. The team is a collaboration between people from Pragmatic Theory, Commendo, Yahoo and AT&T.

“The Netflix Prize seeks to substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences. Improve it enough and you win one (or more) Prizes. Winning the Netflix Prize improves our ability to connect people to the movies they love.”

Since May, ASC has had a lot of activities focused on understanding how Google Wave, Twitter, and other new social media is changing the way we consume news and respond to it. I just finished reading some really interesting articles and watching some videos of how people's behaviors seems to be changing.



First, on June 8th, there was a report that described how, because of the great variety of choices now people have in what they read online, readers now tend to choose news that only fit their view. The research, done by researchers at Ohio State, showed how students tend to seek out and spent time reading media articles that focus on points of views that fit their political ideologies. Students spent 36% more time reading articles that agreed with their points of view.



Perhaps this isn't too surprising, but it has a huge implication for the future of political discourse, since a healthy political debate can only happen when an educated populace is willing to spend time to consider both sides of the issue. This is why Wikipedia has a neutral point of view principle for all articles. The above news article further suggests that the students prefer blogs instead of traditional media outlets for their news. This supports the idea that they read blogs that cater to particular points of views. Moreover, 30% of those surveyed believed blogs are actually more accurate. If this is true, one question to consider is whether having a more balkanized news diet might further polarize the public opinion, and further erode healthy dialog that is necessary for the society to function.



On a more positive note, I also watched Clay Shirky's recent talk on how social media is changing political discourse, because it now enable for not just 1-to-1 (point to point, or telephone/telegram-like technology) or 1-to-many (TV, radio, etc). It now also enables many-to-many communication and coordination. He tells stories of how the Chinese citizens used social media to get out the word about the Sichuan earthquake. They told stories of the heartache as well as the discovery of the corruption of the officials who were responsible for the bad construction jobs on school buildings.



Social media does seem to have changed the speed, cost, and the ability of the public to communicate and coordinate with each other. Citizen journalism does seem like it might have the potential to tip the balance of power back to the people.



Ironically, after these two pieces of information, I'm trying to decide whether I want to feel happy or sad about the state of affairs. I need to spend more time thinking about the changes social media is bringing to the world.

When Steve Irwin, the famous crocodile hunter, was killed by a sting ray, 5.5% of the posts on that day in the blogosphere (September 05, 2006) mentioned his name. Yesterday, mentions of ‘Michael Jackson’ topped out around 3%. Things are heading north from there today – currently around 8% – but note that the more immediate statistics come with a higher margin of error due to the lower sample size.

Twitter has oodles of data – millions of tweets a day. They have smart people working on this data, and they make all the right noises about social search. However, I’m looking at the trending topics on the site just now and I see these: MJ’s, Rip MJ, RIP Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, #iranelection, Pop, Thriller, MTV, Iran, #michaeljackson.

I don’t get it. There are a number of problems here:

1. These aren’t topics, they are words or phrases. There are only 4 topics present here (Michael Jackson’s death, Farrah Fawcett’s death, the Iranian Election and MTV).
2. The ‘phrases’ present in the terms are pretty lame: ‘MJ’s’? Earlier today the phrase ‘Did Michael Jackson’ was a trending topic.
3. There is no attempt at normalization (RIP MJ == RIP Michael Jackson)
4. They actually are not at all interesting – anyone out there not know about Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett or Iran? Perhaps the MTV thing is a little more obscure.
5. They aren’t trending – ok, the RIP stories are, but the Iranian election? that’s been top of mind for many days now.

Twitter’s featuring of these topics and the immaturity of the technology in spite of the promise of the data does not paint a good picture for their prospects.

Wired’s Threat Level has another example of how social media are being used by Iranian citizens trying to promulgate their cause in Google Maps Track Iran Protests.

“As the protests in Iran continue for the second week, a Google user named Xárene Eskandar is following the activity on a Google Maps page, logging the events each day as they’re reported.

The latest map from Wednesday tracks events by the hour and shows the movement of special forces vans and military helicopters as they close in on protesters, as well as the location where protesters have reported seeing or hearing gunshots.”

At the beginning of this year, I was sad to learn of the passing of Peter Kollock. He was one of the first to carefully think about cooperation and online communities. I've been citing his 1996 paper "The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace" for a long time now.

Unfortunately, while checking Web references, I discovered the above link to his paper no longer works (i.e., 404). This is the link that appears on his Wikipedia page and dozens of online bibliographies. It appears UCLA yanked his whole web space. The lack of institutional commitment to preserving work and providing stable URIs has always been a great irritation (e.g., see my entry on digital posterity about the links in my dissertation that were soon broken); at the W3C we would frequently talk about this frustration and how to best maintain our own commitment to preservation. And it's not only in death that our work soon disappears. After my time at the Berkman Center, subsequent to a Web site reorganization, I noted all the links to my work there were broken. They were able, and kind enough, to restore the HTML files though my biographical page looks screwy because of broken CSS and relative links -- so I don't even link to that anymore.

In the case of this particular paper by Kollock, it was fortunately published in a book, and I found a PDF version as well -- though I preferred the HTML.

Kollock, P. (1999a). The economies of online cooperation: Gifts and public goods in cyberspace. In Smith, M. and Kollock, P., editors, Communities in Cyberspace. Routledge Press, London. URL http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/archive/00002998/

This is not your father’s Macbook.

Marti Hearst - pre-eminant in the fields of text mining and user interfaces - yesterday published her book on Search User Interfaces. I intend to write up a review of the content later, but for now heres a summary.

The book, which is available freely online,  describes itself thus:

and covers topics including the design and evaluation of interfaces, and visualization of search results.

Coincidently, the launch of the book is timely with the recent launch of Bing. A big part of the strategy behind Bing has been to provide a better user experience around search, offering affordances to help the user succeed in their task right there in the interface. Marti's book, which was completed prior to Bing's launch, doesn't cover this new search engine, but I'm sure the second edition will!

Marti is blogging about the book at SearchUpTicious (!)

Chris Anderson's "apparent plagiarism" of Wikipedia has prompted me to post something I was experimenting with last week about citations and URLs. Anderson claims that his text, which is very much like that of some Wikipedia articles, previously quoted and cited Wikipedia as a reference. However, in discussions with his publisher, there was some uncertainty about how to treat URLs (since Web pages might change) and Wikipedia (since it is collaboratively authored). Hence, he attempted a "write-though" for the "case of source material without an individual author to credit (as in the case of Wikipedia)." This is obviously problematic and Wikipedia, on every article, gives guidance on how it can be cited, including the use of a permanent link to a specific version.

However, I can sympathize with the ugliness of long URLs and "last accessed" requirements. Since I began work on my Wikipedia manuscript an aspiration has been to create a work in which the vast majority of historical and ethnographic sources are readily accessible to the reader. This means I have a lot of references. So, as I give thought to the book in print and online form, I wonder how to strike the best balance. I've moved on from the dissertation's APA author-year towards Chicago Manual of Style notes format. Yet, I noticed that notes with URLs can get rather ugly. Particularly if one has more than one citation in a note. (Otherwise it looks like a law review paper.) My notes only implementation of Chicago, where the first reference is a full citation and subsequent references are short but include the oldid since I make use of different versions of the same article, is below. Imagine pages of this stuff, it's not easy to read:

53. Wikipedia, "Wikipedia:Neutral Point of View," Wikimedia, September 16, 2004, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia: Neutral point of view & oldid = 6042007 (accessed March 5, 2004); Wikipedia, "Wikipedia:Neutral Point of View," Wikimedia, November 3, 2008, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia: Neutral point of view&oldid=249390830 (accessed November 3, 2008).

    ...

54. Wikipedia, "Wikipedia:Neutral Point of View (oldid=249390830)."

In the context of the Chicago notes variants, I've made the following experiment in my manuscript:

1. Long (end) notes upon first instance (including URL) and subsequent short notes (with version number noted in title of Wikipedia pages, such as in note 63 above) subsequently yields 396 pages.
2. Exclusively short (end) notes followed by bibliography with full citation (including URL) yields 452 pages.

Option 2 is more readable, but requires another redirection by the reader if they want full bibliographic detail, and adds pages (and weight and cost) to a book. Another option is to use an adaptation of Option 1: standard long-then-short Chicago without URLs in the printed book, which are provided online. This make a practical sort of sense (and this is what Anderson says he was planning to do), but is non-standard and I'm not sure how it would be received.

However, this difficulty doesn't mean that one should simply "write through" one's sources (whatever that means) and remove the attributions all together.

For the past few months, there have been a variety of calls for feedback and suggestions on how the US Government can move towards becoming more open and transparent, especially in terms of their dealings with citizens and also for disseminating information about their recent financial stimulus package.

As part of this, the National Dialogue forum was set up to solicit solutions for ways of monitoring the “expenditure and use of recovery funds”. Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal on how linked open data could provide semantically-rich, linkable and reusable data from Recovery.gov. I also blogged about this recently, detailing some ideas for how discussions by citizens on the various uses of expenditure (represented using SIOC and FOAF) could be linked together with financial grant information (in custom vocabularies).

More recently, the Open Government Initiative solicited ideas for a government that is “more transparent, participatory, and collaborative”, and the brainstorming and discussion phases have just ended. This process is now in its third phase, where the ideas proposed to solve various challenges are to be more formally drafted in a collaborative manner.

What is surprising about this is how few submissions and contributions have been put into this third and final phase (see graph below), especially considering that there is only one week for this to be completed. Some topics have zero submissions, e.g. “Data Transparency via Data.gov: Putting More Data Online”.

This doesn’t mean that people aren’t still thinking about this. On Monday, Tim Berners-Lee published a personal draft document entitled “Putting Government Data Online“. But we need more contributions from the Linked Data community to the drafts during phase three of the Open Government Directive if we truly believe that this solution can make a difference.

The NYT reports in New Military Command for Cyberspace that the DoD has put NSA in charge of a unified U.S. Cyber Command to oversee the protection of military networks against cyber threats.

“Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Tuesday ordered the creation of the military’s first headquarters designed to coordinate Pentagon efforts in the emerging battlefield of cyberspace and computer-network security, officials said. Pentagon officials said Mr. Gates intends to nominate Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, currently director of the National Security Agency, for a fourth star and to take on the top job at the new organization, to be called Cybercom. The new command’s mission will be to coordinate the day-to-day operation — and protection — of military and Pentagon computer networks.”

CYBERCOM will be a subordinate unified command under the US Strategic Command.

Telligent has been hard at work upgrading our platforms in the past months and the results have been announced at this year’s Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston.  There have been significant changes across the product line along with new names.  Our platform for Internet facing communities, formerly called Community Server, is now “Telligent Community“; the intranet enterprise collaboration platform formerly known as Evolution is now “Telligent Enterprise“; and the analysis and reporting platform I work on, formerly known as Harvest, is now “Telligent Analytics 3.0“.  The name changes reflect a significant number of enhancements in each product.

The development team has focused on integration with existing business applications, manageability, ease-of-use, measurability and reporting the demonstrates  ROI.  My focus has largely been on Telligent Analytics 3.0, a platform that helps companies quantify engagement both inside and outside their online communities.  The big step forward in this release is the focus on the patterns of connections created by the conversations and other user activities that take place in either a Telligent Community or a Telligent Enterprise site.  Where activity was previously measured in amounts of activity (counts of number of authors or messages) now activity is also measured in terms of the quality and quality of connections between people and the objects they create.  Telligent Analytics now builds several “social graphs” from the aggregate of these links and then applies the techniques of social network analysis to calculate measures that describe the graph as a whole as well as each individual or object in the graph.  By calculating metrics like “eigenvector” centrality among other network metrics, Telligent Analytics can generate a score that describes how much any participant resembles I a number of roles in their social media communities.  It is useful to know which of your community participants are the “answer people” and who is gets the discussions that thrive started.  These metrics make it easier to find and follow influencers within your organization or community.

Rob Howard, the current CTO and founder of Telligent, describes the products as a way to bring “social computing, enterprise technology and traditional communication [...]  together to break down information silos and enhance measurability both inside and outside the organization.”

Telligent Community 5.0 and Telligent Enterprise 2.0 are now available, previews of Telligent Analytics 3.0, which will be released soon, are by invitation, let me know if you would like to have a look!

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My colleagues Derek Hansen and Ben Shneiderman (University of Maryland) and I have just finished the second version of our tutorial/manual for the NodeXL social network analysis toolkit for Excel.

The latest version of the tutorial Analyzing Social Media Networks: Learning by Doing with NodeXL is now available from the University of Maryland Center for the Advanced Study of Communities and Information (CASCI) web site.  We will use this version of the document in our upcoming tutorial at the Communities and Technologies conference at Penn State University on June 24th.

We plan to continue to expand the tutorial to include a step-by-step guide to the analysis of several major social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, delicious, and flickr as well as personal stores of social media like your own email (if it is stored in a Windows Search Index found on most Windows desktops).  Our goal is to create an easy-to-follow guide to network theory for people who new to the field or who do not want to develop programming skills to perform network analysis.  We are focused on social media as a data source for social media although other examples are included,  like the United States Senate voting network that reveals interesting patterns in the connections created when votes are cast.  Using 2007 data it reveals which Senators are most likely to change party affiliation.

Your comments, corrections, and suggestions for improving the document are welcome.

Instructors interested in teaching classes about social networks are welcome to make use of both the NodeXL toolkit and the document to guide students through the core concepts of social network theory.

Here is the table of contents:



1) Basic: Getting started with NodeXL

Data entry

Showing the graph

Highlighting an edge

Importing an edge list

2) Layout: Arranging Vertices in the Graph Pane

Automatic Layout

Directed Graph Type

Updating the Graph Pane

Manual Layout

Preserving manual layout

Zooming and Scale

3) Visual Design: Making network displays meaningful

Vertex Colors

Adding Descriptive Data

Changing Vertex Size (and other properties)

AutoFilling Columns

Legend

Changing General Graph Appearance

4) Labeling: adding text labels to vertices and links

Adding Primary Labels

Adding Secondary Labels

Adding Tooltips

5) Graph Metrics: Calculating and visualizing metrics

Computing Graph Metrics

Saving a NodeXL File

Kite Network Example

Opening an existing NodeXL File

Overall Metrics

Vertex Metrics

Degree

Betweenness Centrality

Closeness Centrality

Eigenvector Centrality

Clustering Coefficient

6) Preparing Data: Merging Edges and Sorting to Label Data

SeriousEats Analysis

Merging Duplicate Edges

Sorting Data

Auto-Filling Data Columns

Formulas

7) Filtering: Reducing clutter to reveal important features

Dynamic Filters

Filtering by Autofilling the Visibility Column

Subgraph Images

Putting It All Together

Clustering: Identifying and displaying vertex clusters

2007 Senate Voting Analysis

Creating Clusters Manually

Changing Advanced Layout Options

Creating Clusters Automatically

Showing and Hiding Clusters

Share and Enjoy:

Wired has an interesting article on Facebook vs. Google, Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network’s Plan to Dominate the Internet — and Keep Google Out.

“Today, the Google-Facebook rivalry isn’t just going strong, it has evolved into a full-blown battle over the future of the Internet—its structure, design, and utility. For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google’s algorithms—rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg’s vision, users will query this “social graph” to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire—rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search. It is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that places Facebook right at the center. In other words, right where Google is now.”

This is definitely a David and Goliath match, what with Facebook not having turned a profit yet. The article does a good job of pointing out how their services are different and complement one another.

At the risk of evoking discredited stereotypes, maybe Google is from Mars and Facebook is from Venus.

Wired has an interesting article on Facebook vs. Google, Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network’s Plan to Dominate the Internet — and Keep Google Out.

“Today, the Google-Facebook rivalry isn’t just going strong, it has evolved into a full-blown battle over the future of the Internet—its structure, design, and utility. For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google’s algorithms—rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg’s vision, users will query this “social graph” to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire—rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search. It is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that places Facebook right at the center. In other words, right where Google is now.”

This is definitely a David and Goliath match, what with Facebook not having turned a profit yet. The article does a good job of pointing out how their services are different and complement one another.

At the risk of evoking discredited stereotypes, maybe Google is from Mars and Facebook is from Venus.

Kate Niederhoffer, and her colleagues have posted about her groups move into a space they term Social Business Design. In a sense, what they describe is a reaction to the siloing of thinking around social media brought on by the term ‘media’ itself. This is, perhaps, an extension of my dismissal of the term ‘consumer generated media’ due to its origination in the world of marketing and advertising. Kate and friends are making the point that the social part of the future of online ecologies is not just about ‘media’ per se, but about the entire end-to-end, front-to-back dissemination, assimilation and synthesis of information and its integration with business processes and models.

While this is an interesting direction, it reminds me of terms like ‘democratization’. As anyone in a large organization can attest, capitalism doesn’t scale through democracy. Good companies succeed via Philosopher Kings. The idea that social effects will permeate a large organization without accommodating hierarchy is a little far fetched.

Niederhoffer et al’s thesis centres on four core notions. As Kate puts it:

• Ecosystem - a community of connections
• Hivemind - the socially calibrated mindset of individuals
• Dynamic Signal - the constant multi-faceted means of collaboration
• Metafilter- a method of finding signals in vast amounts of noise

The later two are clearly about information flow. Hivemind (which I’ve always taken to mean the aggregate psychological process of a group, not that of an individual moderated by social context) is also about information diffusion and the assimilation of social cues in moderating that information and republishing.

Perhaps the key to understanding what this topic is about is to understand the scale at which is intended to be implemented. I’m excited to follow where their thinking leads and what impact it will have on reshaping existing businesses and forming new ones.

KDAF-TV in Dallas/Fort Worth did a story on privacy and social media featuring an interview with Murat Kantarcioglu.

“Online Social Networks are redefining privacy and personal security, but how much of your personal life have you already given up? A professor at UT Dallas says chances are you’ve given up more than you know.

The New York Times has an article on the etiquette of using your smart phone in meetings, At Meetings, It’s Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners.

“As Web-enabled smartphones have become standard on the belts and in the totes of executives, people in meetings are increasingly caving in to temptation to check e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, even (shhh!) ESPN.com. But a spirited debate about etiquette has broken out. Traditionalists say the use of BlackBerrys and iPhones in meetings is as gauche as ordering out for pizza. Techno-evangelists insist that to ignore real-time text messages in a need-it-yesterday world is to invite peril.”

Professors have been dealing with this for several years, since most of our students come to class with their laptops. Maybe they are taking notes. But why is he smiling? Now he’s laughing! Was my comment on hill climbing really that funny?

Of course, the dynamics of this is different outside the classroom.

“In many professional circles, where connections are power, making a show of reaching out to those connections even as co-workers are presenting a spreadsheet presentation seems to have become a kind of workplace boast. Mr. Brotherton, the consultant, wrote in an e-mail message that it was customary now for professionals to lay BlackBerrys or iPhones on a conference table before a meeting — like gunfighters placing their Colt revolvers on the card tables in a saloon. “It’s a not-so-subtle way of signaling ‘I’m connected. I’m busy. I’m important. And if this meeting doesn’t hold my interest, I’ve got 10 other things I can do instead.’ ”