Five reasons social networking doesn't work

Five reasons social networking doesn't work, Molly Wood, The Buzz Report, CNet, 2 June 2005

1. There's nothing to do there
2. It takes too much time
3. Traffic alone isn't enough
4. Strangers kind of suck (or, put nicely, the social hierarchy is really not that attractive)
5. We already have the Internet

Music network analysis

Visible Path post on Music Network Analysis

A number of people have been studying music, composers and collaborators and tunes, using network analysis.

One typical study focuses on who records together (there have been some really interesting analyses of the jazz world, from the 1920's through the 1970's). Another typical study focuses on who records what theme, or tune, or, as it is known in the reggae world, rhythm.

With a link to Six Degrees of Raggae Riddims, an excellent SNA of the raggae world.

Network-centric business

Mopsos quotes an interview with Prof. Manuel Castells concludes thusly, Network-centric business

Now this is exactly what I would like to see happening in our large organizations: moving from vertical and rigid bureaucracies to horizontal living and interconnected networks. Imagine local teams of information-oriented (more than sales-oriented) people, and back offices of specialized teams, or "Value Shops", as Tom Stewart puts it. And I think the key is not so much in the technology than in what Prof. Castells calls the "programming of the network" .

Who knows whom, and who knows what?

CIO Magazine's Susannah Patton has a piece on social network analysis in the June 15, 2005 edition: Who Knows Whom, And Who Knows What? Valdis Krebs is quoted.

Employees' personal connections can be as valuable as their individual knowledge base. Social network analysis, or SNA, helps maximize a company's collective smarts.

Informal learning = Network learning

George Siemens looks at an article on informal learning from Fast Company and sees a network appear in how we acquire knowledge: Informal Learning

This concept of network learning answers many questions about how we acquire much of our knowledge (even elements that contradict each other). When we exist in a knowledge climate (or network), we constantly scan, evaluate, and select for use, elements that answer questions with which we are struggling. Some elements of learning will relate to our values, attitudes, and beliefs, others will relate more concretely to how we perform our work. In an election season, politicians rely heavily on "teaching" the electorate through a network imbued with their message. If the electorate is unwilling to accept the message directly, perhaps it will accept the message when embedded in our existing learning network (i.e. an unpalatable concept is more attractive when it links (even if inaccurately) to our existing values and lines of reasoning). Perhaps as educators, we need to become more aware of how people learn from their network. Often, I imagine, our formal instruction competes with information sources in their existing learning network (particularly relating to soft skills).

Workshop on Link Discovery, Aug 21 2005 in Chicago

Per a recent post to SOCNET, the following workshop of interest to MeshForum will be held later this summer in Chicago.

The Workshop on Link Discovery: Issues, Approaches and Applications (LinkKDD-2005), to be held August 21, 2005 - Chicago, IL, USA in conjunction with ACM SIGKDD-2005,

has extended its paper submission deadline to June 20th.

For more info, please see http://www.isi.edu/LinkKDD-05/Content/cfp.htm

TOPICS OF INTEREST
-----------------------------------
Particular topics of interest for the workshop include but are not
limited to:

* Theoretical advances to link discovery and group detection
* Practical applications of link discovery to real world databases
* Link-analysis and graph mining
* Social network analysis and community finding
* Graph theory, scale-free networks and small world phenomenon
* Web-mining and text-mining applied to link discovery
* Link discovery for data streams and scalability of developed
approaches
* Record linkage, alias detection and object consolidation
* Visualization of link structures
* Performance evaluation measures
* Innovative applications in areas such as medical informatics,
insurance, laws enforcements and web communities
* Link discovery and other theoretical fields such as natural
language processing, agent theory, complex systems, trust models and
dynamic pricing models
* Survey and analysis of deployed link discovery integrated systems,
commercial products, educational and commercial packages

Please consider submitting a paper to this workshop.