Social networks guru Valdis Krebs has written an analysis which purports to show that creating a single intelligence czar is less efficient in terms of getting intelligence to the President than leaving the stove pipes but adding connections among them. Maybe. But Krebs leaves out at least two critical externalities. First, his proposed solution requires […]
scalefree-networks
It's a Small Campus After All
Gilad Ravid and Sheizaf Rafaeli’s new piece in FirstMonday, “Asynchronous Discussion Groups as Small World and Scale Free Networks“, analyzes a voluntary learning community that develops on a university’s LMS. These are all students who are (apparently) registered for on-campus web-enhanced courses with strictly voluntary web-enhanced components. Interestingly, the study analyzed networking for the entire […]
overstated: Weblogs and authority
In the Overstated weblog (great name, by the way), Cameron Marlow suggests that blogrolls are proxies for popularity while links directly from a blog post to a permalink of another blog are proxies for influence. For example, slashdot is popular in blogrolls but Joi Ito is popular to link to in posts. Marlow does some […]
Weblog Audience-Building and the Strength of Weak Ties
One of the challenges you face when you start a new weblog is attracting an audience. Who is going to gather the pearls of wisdom that you offer to the world? It’s not that hard these days to find somebody you know who already has a weblog and would be willing to link to you; […]
Informational Cascades, Network Theory, and Behavioral Economics
Stephen Downes’ mention of my article on informational cascades (thanks for the plug, Stephen) led me to his post in the trdev discussion group. He writes: In network theory, ‘groupthink’ is an instance of what is known as a cascade phenomenon. A cascade occurs (all other things being equal) when the propogation of a property […]
Is Johnson's "Clustering Emergence" Really Small-world Network Formation?
I was thinking some more last night about Stephen Johnson’s new position that there are separate types of clustering and adaptive emergence as I was reading Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s book Linked (which I am enjoying immensely, by the way; more on that in a later post). I suddenly had a flash of intuition that what Johnson […]
Link Prediction in Social Networks
I’m afraid this is going to be something of an echo-blog, since I don’t have the paid subscription to the ACM library necessary to allow me to see the original article, but the About Kim weblog has an intriguing and encouraging quote from an academic article on link predictability within social networks: By running our […]