This paper examines social network size in contemporary Western society based on the exchange of Christmas cards. Maximum network size averaged 153.5 individuals, with a mean network size of 124.9 for those individuals explicitly contacted; these values are remarkably close to the group size of 150 predicted for humans on the basis of the size of their neocortex. Age, household type, and the relationship to the individual influence network structure, although the proportion of kin remained relatively constant at around 21%. Frequency of contact between network members was primarily determined by two classes of variable: passive factors (distance, work colleague, overseas) and active factors (emotional closeness, genetic relatedness). Controlling for the influence of passive factors on contact rates allowed the hierarchical structure of human social groups to be delimited. These findings suggest that there may be cognitive constraints on network size.

From Datanetis’s experience, social network marketing using influencers is comprised of two cycles. The first is the closed friends cycle, from the results it seems as if they almost decide simultaneously to follow the leader. This first wave peaks around 4-5 weeks from the beginning of the campaign. The second wave peaks around 9-10 weeks traversing through the rest of the social sphere. This may indicate that the customers are going through different decision making processes at different locations on the social network graph (influencers affinity). This knowledge offers Datanetis customers ways to fine tune their campaigns over time.

I cringe a little when I hear that someone is “working on a viral campaign” for a product or service. I see viral marketing as taking a fingers crossed approach to marketing — hoping that you’ve created something cool enough that others will want to pass it on to their friends — while social networking means that you take an active role in cultivating and maintaining relationships with your friends, customers, fans, and other interested parties. To me, it’s the difference between passive and proactive action.

Social networking is not a magic new concept. If anything, it’s a return to basics: talking to your customers, reminding them that they are important to you. The only difference between then and now is that your customers are everywhere and technology gives you the power to find them, listen to them, talk to them, and build relationships that extend long beyond the boundaries of a traditional marketing campaign.

i for one welcome our new physicist overlords (they have more computing power than us social scientists)

NS2 is devoted to documenting the variety of online social network sites and services established to faciliate networking among communities with focused interests or purpose. NS2 is a companion blog to Friends: Social Networking Sites for Engaged Library Services and SciTechNet(s):Science and Technology Networks.

To which I thought, "Yes, you scrofulous maroon, she's going to be there at the same time as me. It's not a coincidence, it because I'm married to her. And thank you for the offer to relay a message, but not only do I have her on speed-dial, but she'll be sitting in the window seat next to me, which means she's going to arrive at quite nearly the same time as I do."

That pretty much sums it up. You can't swing a tweet around here anymore without having it mashed up into some new social network, and none of them have even a junior-high school clue about human relationships. You can have friends and secretly rank them by how good a friend they are, but not indicate the relationship that is by definition a public declaration. You can say you're in a relationship and not looking for dates, but you can't put in a link to whom. You can give testimonials, but you can't use a joint checking account in two PayPal accounts.

via the syllabus finder

on personality and network coordinates; how people who are good actors get ahead by molding themselves to the situation.

Excerpt: Economists and biologists have both provided explanations of
decentralized cooperation among self-regarding individuals as a result of
repeated interactions. Repeated interactions do provide opportunities for
cooperative individuals to discipline defectors, and may be effective in
groups of two individuals. However, we will show that none of these models
is adequate for groups of reasonable size and for plausible assumptions
about the information available to each individual. Moreover, even
presupposing extraordinary cognitive capacities and levels of patience
among the cooperating individuals, it is unlikely that a group of more
than two individuals would ever discover the cooperative equilibria that
the models have identified (...)

* [5] Cooperative Homo economicus, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, DOI:
SFI-WP 08-07-030, SFI Working Papers

This on-line textbook introduces many of the basics of formal approaches to the analysis of social networks. The text relies heavily on the work of Freeman, Borgatti, and Everett (the authors of the UCINET software package). The materials here, and their organization, were also very strongly influenced by the text of Wasserman and Faust, and by a graduate seminar conducted by Professor Phillip Bonacich at UCLA. Many other users have also made very helpful comments and suggestions based on the first version. Errors and omissions, of course, are the responsibility of the authors.

We studied the entire Wikipedia corpus, 485 Gbytes of data, adding up to 1.9 million pages and 28.2 million revisions. Using a suite of tools we developed, we showed that the ratio of undefined to defined concepts in Wikipedia has been stable over time. Furthermore, we found that articles are added to Wikipedia in a collaborative fashion: Wikipedians often add a new article when they encounter a missing entry. Finally, we established that Wikipedia grows in a manner similar to that witnessed in a number of different areas, by having new articles linked to the most popular existing articles. This pattern of growth, called preferential attachment, has been used to explain the number of species per genus, the internet, the world-wide-web, scientific citations, collaboration networks between people, and others. It is the first time preferential attachment has been studied live at a structure of this size.

Graph vertices are often organized into groups that seem to live fairly independently of the rest of the graph, with which they share but a few edges, whereas the relationships between group members are stronger, as shown by the large number of mutual connections. Such groups of vertices, or communities, can be considered as independent compartments of a graph. Detecting communities is of great importance in sociology, biology and computer science, disciplines where systems are often represented as graphs. The task is very hard, though, both conceptually, due to the ambiguity in the definition of community and in the discrimination of different partitions and practically, because algorithms must find ``good'' partitions among an exponentially large number of them. Other complications are represented by the possible occurrence of hierarchies, i.e. communities which are nested inside larger communities,

Mark Brooks has placed ads on MySpace and has been “amazed” at the low response rate, even on large, well-placed ads. The veteran marketing consultant says the puny results were almost “unbelievable.”

whereIstand.com is a Web 2.0, social networking community that lets members define who they are by their opinions. Members can take a stand on issues important to them, compare themselves with people in their network, or with people they are considering a

'store my knowledge in my friends' is an axiom for collecting knowledge through collecting people."

We explore the development of theory around community, and the significance of boundaries, social networks and social norms - and why attention to social capital and communion may be important.

"Convoys Over the Life Course: Attachment, Roles, and Social Support."

3 holds on first copy. (it's ok for you to reserve it, I've already reserved mine)

First, socioeconomic and aesthetic influences on taste are considered, and the expressivity of interest tokens is analyzed using a semiotic framework.

We see clusters of happy and unhappy individuals in the social network like blinking lights in this complex fabric that is made up of people where some people are happy and some people are unhappy and there is a kind of gray zone between them.

NetworkX (NX) is a Python package for the creation, manipulation, and study of the structure, dynamics, and functions of complex networks.

valdis notes cleveland as a disconnected economy - no doubt SE Michigan looks the same way

The other day, I learned some simple and powerful networking techniques from 9-year old Austin on the playground in my suburban community.

visualization of book relationships

uk based parents (mothers mostly that is) network

"social network" auf Deutsch

If you’d like to try importing from GMail, Twitter, a local vCard file or using a contact list from a site supporting the HCard/XFN microformats, please try out these new capabilities and send us feedback.

The event is on “how your enterprise can profit from social networking: in promotion and marketing, in the development of new products and content creation, and even by making communities one of the services your business offers as an ancillary to conte

If you just need bodies at a rally, names on a petition or donations in your coffers, mobilizing through traditional means will work great. But if you need an active, educated and effective movement, organizing through social webs has the potential to cre

Other Facebook entrepreneurs, and their would-be financiers, are indulging in the kind of exuberant thinking that recalls the first dot-com bubble. This summer, Lee Lorenzen, a venture capitalist in Monterey, Calif., who describes himself as “the first

Crackbook is an addictive social utility that makes you feel that you're connecting with people when actually you're just not

skeptical review of Marzar; some squabbling in the comments

Research interests: Social, economic and technological change, particularly in mature industrial economies; historical social network analysis.

In talking with investors, the choice is really clear: you either believe that networking has passed my generation by…that we will never adopt it, or you believe (as I do) that people in their 40s and 50s will network when the right product comes along.

CafeMom, a no-frills social network site for mothers, has raised $5 million in funding.

“Email is how you talk to old people” - AADL gamer

Increase in Size of Network , Increase in internal network connectivity , Increase in connections to valuable third parties , Increase in projects formed with all of the above

valdis has a blog

if you have identified a customer need in your enterprise, but you are stuck because of some limitations of current technology, you may try to establish or join a network of people, perhaps around the world in different organizations and capacities, who c

The source code is the ultimate documentation

community support groups for patient health information

Identity provision will increasingly be tied to social networks. Our lives are being lived online more and more, our friends will be living their lives online too. There will be a whole class of people who are un-provenanced, their lives are not online.

html version via google of 1960s look at the rise of automobiles as a way of expanding communications space, via barry wellman

CNET says: "Duncan Watts, professor of sociology at Columbia University, where he was director of the Collective Dynamics Group, and author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, will lead Yahoo's research in human social dynamics, including soci

Spread throughout my recent writing, a certain latent idea is lurking, incompletely articulated, which I summarize in the title: the individual is the new group.

For example, sharing a single class had roughly the same effect on developing a new relationship as sharing a single mutual friend. Curiously, additional mutual friends counted for more than additional shared classes. And shared activities and friends cou

Social networks evolve over time, driven by the shared activities and affiliations of their members, by similarity of individuals' attributes, and by the closure of short network cycles

We construct a connected network of 3.9 million nodes from mobile phone call records, which can be regarded as a proxy for the underlying human communication network at the societal level.

Andreessen provides the perfect “WTF” comment that sums it up for me: “The idea that Cisco is going to be a force in social networking is about as plausible as Ning being a force in optical switches.”

email is good for social networks; web use is bad. (or at least that's the idea)

via Shannon Clark

interview in a hair salon where everyone uses Myspace!

on the network of ex-pittsburgh people and where they go and how they connect

ample reasons why I am happy that I am not a teenager navigating myspace right now

on neighborhood information systems and how they promote social sorting. "birds of a feather flock together", especially if the birds have GIS systems to find each other.

Networked governance refers to a growing body of research on the interconnectedness of essentially sovereign units, which examines how those interconnections facilitate or inhibit the functioning of the overall system. The objective of this program is two

cash flow positive as a result of monetizing the recruiter/headhunter roles. not as cool as myspace and not as valuable. commenters suggest that many users never touch the site and can't unsubscribe easily.

bridging ties = access, profit; bonding ties = trust, community. pick your networks carefully.

I mean, I'd love it if I could dump my email address book into a social network software tool... I hate looking at my contacts in long lists. It would be great to be able to group them in that fashion... And also have them regroup themselves based on attr

from harvard

lada adamic teaching pajek to her students. (hint: try graphviz too, analytics are not good but it makes pretty graphs fast - or omnigraffle)

high res scan of mark lombardi drawing

from dan cooney

Nosh Contractor presentation on IKNOW - who you know, and what they know

Valdis Krebs now speaking at Meshforum

arguing for bipartite networks - people linked to each other through objects

the value to bridging structural holes does not extend to those a step away from the bridge

looking for people in networks who are "energizers"

personal history of computer and network use

includes Spoke architecture white paper