Mark Newman is a physics professor at the University of Michigan and the author of a comprehensive textbook on network analysis (Networks: An Introduction, 784 pages) He has studied networks in fields ranging from sociology and economics to computer science and biology. In 2010,  he gave three talks on network analysis as part of the Santa Fe Institute‘s 2010 Ulam Lecture series.

We recommend all three for people interested in finding more about relational thinking and network structures.

2010 Ulam Lecture – The Connected World

2010 Ulam Lecture – What Networks Can Tell Us about the World

2010 Ulam Lecture – Using Networks to Make Predictions

It seems that social networking sites are almost “old news” these days. As a media platform, social networking sites (SNS) have been around since the late 1990s, and today the popular SNS Facebook.com boasts more than 350 million active users (nevermind all those people who’ve registered for accounts never to actually use them).

So what’s next for SNS? For 2010, geo-tagging and geo-targeting appear to be the latest trends. The AP recently reported on the emergence of the SNS Foursquare.com as one of the latest buzz-sites. What’s the buzz about? Foursquare – which currently has over 100,000 users in 100 cities – is basically a social network for your immediate circle of friends (and a way to meet people nearby). You report where you’re at currently, and where you’ve been recently, and it’s mapped and tracked on Foursquare. The catch is, you earn points for checking in to locations, and the most recent person to check in becomes the “mayor”. So you compete against your friends to earn points. It sounds simple, but can become very addictive.

Foursquare isn’t alone. A number of other companies are venturing into the geo-SNS space. Google recently launched Latitude, phones are increasingly supporting GPS, and Windows 7 and Mac’s Snow Leopard will soon be enable to actively report location for laptop users.

Not that this is anything new for academics. In 2007, Lee Humphreys (now at Cornell University‘s Department of Communication) wrote an article looking how users form social groups and social ties in mobile networks. What’s so new in 2010? For one, there’s a much large network of resources available for users of these networks. With more and more users having GPS-enabled devices, it’s easier to share your location with others. And the evolution of SNS has made people more comfortable with the notion that others will know where you’re at. Advertisers are tapping into this trend too, as Ad Age notes in an article this week. Geo-SNS and geo-targeting are allowing advertisers to target consumers based not only on what they do, but also where they are at.

Interesting right? And for us, as researchers, the relationship between “location” and “network formation” looks to be an area for future work. Happy Holidays.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Will Facebook buy Foursquare? (thenextweb.com)
• Location’s Social Paradox (techcrunch.com)

A November 26th, 2009, column in The Los Angeles Times, titled “A Connected Life is a Great Gift” discusses the importance of social networks during the holiday season.  The authors James H. Fowler and Nicholas A. Christakis summarize some of the findings presented in their new book Connected, focusing how at this time of the year, keeping your friends and family around is important.  They write:

“Recent research has shown that we would rather give an anonymous gift to a friend who will never repay us than give a gift to a stranger who will. The reason is that we give to sustain our network. In fact, the natural advantages of a connected life explain why social networks have been with us for hundreds of thousands of years. So as we gather for the holidays, it is important to consider the extraordinary power of our social networks. We not only help ourselves by staying connected, we also help our whole community.”

Full article here

James Fowler

The Annenberg Networks Network is pleased to invite you to a presentation given by James Fowler, associate professor in the Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems at CALIT2 and the political science department at the University of California, San Diego.

Dr Fowler’s work is in the areas of social networks, behavioral economics, evolutionary game theory, political participation, cooperation, and genopolitics (the study of the genetic basis of political behavior).

The title of the talk at USC – and of Fowler’s recently published book – is “Connected: The surprising power of our social networks and how they shape our lives.”

The presentation will take place on November 23rd, at noon in the Geoffrey Cowan Forum (ASC Room 207), Annenberg, University of Southern California.

Parking information and directions to campus.

Firm Scope Experience, Historic Multimarket Contact with Partners, Centrality, and the Relationship Between Structural Holes and Performance.

Andrew V. Shipilov (2009), Organization Science, January-February 2009; 20: 85 – 106.

This study investigates characteristics that affect the relationship between firms’ positions in a network of collaborative ties with other firms and their performance. Firms located in similarly structured networks rich in structural holes may obtain different performance results depending on their (1) capacity to absorb heterogeneous information, (2) ability to protect against partner noncooperation, and (3) bargaining power. Read the rest of this entry »

Interpretations of the Web of Data:

The emerging Web of Data utilizes the web infrastructure to represent and interrelate data. The foundational standards of the Web of Data include the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and the Resource Description Framework (RDF). URIs are used to identify resources and RDF is used to relate resources. While RDF has been posited as a logic language designed specifically for knowledge representation and reasoning, it is more generally useful if it can conveniently support other models of computing. In order to realize the Web of Data as a general-purpose medium for storing and processing the world’s data, it is necessary to separate RDF from its logic language legacy and frame it simply as a data model. Moreover, there is significant advantage in seeing the Semantic Web as a particular interpretation of the Web of Data that is focused specifically on knowledge representation and reasoning. By doing so, other interpretations of the Web of Data are exposed that realize RDF in different capacities and in support of different computing models.