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Michael Boyle's weblog

Homer and Social Networks

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It has been two years since I was involved in social network mapping professionally but that doesn’t mean I’ve lost interest – I keep seeing interesting applications of these approaches as network mapping techniques continue to make the jump into all kinds of academic disciplines. The latest: The Remarkable Properties of Mythological Social Networks.

Basically – the social networks in The Odyssey (Homer, obv) are remarkably similar to real-life modern social networks, which is evidence that the epic poem is in fact based to some extent on real events and real people. Cool.

Intro to Metadata analysis

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With all the discussion about the NSA and other organizations’ surveillance of online sources it’s important to understand what people are writing about. In fact, one of the chief complaints about journalistic coverage so far is that journalists seem to be getting the story more wrong than right – whether this is due to a fundamental lack of comprehension of the subject matter or for more wilful reasons is tough to assess.

Anyhow… earlier this month Kieran Healy published a super-interesting intro to “Metadata Analysis” – i.e., the analysis not of messages’ contents, but information about the messages: Using Metadata to find Paul Revere.

“Social” is now the default – or should be

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Thomas Purves has written a great post suggesting – correctly, in my view – that It’s time to take “social” for granted.

Here’s the news. [Social media] is no longer interesting. It’s time is done. Now don’t get me wrong, there’s still vast areas of everyday business, enterprise and government that still need to be beaten severely with the Web2.0 stick (even the Web1.0 stick would still help in some places). Rather, it’s now time to think of socialness and 2.0ness as “business as usual” in the IT industry. The substantive battle is over, this is a mopping up operation. And there’s a ton of rolling up the sleeves and value to unlock left to do in almost any vertical industry.

I’ve been working on crossovers between social media and mobile for over a year now (from time to time – consulting gigs) and from my perspective mobile has already arrived. I think it’s almost irresponsible to consider a “new media” strategy without considering the social and mobile options that can be baked in, and not as some kind of cute bolt-on strategy but integrally to the whole thing.

Centralizing the social map

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Loïc Le Meur has written a nice succinct post about social networks and software and decentralization: My social map is totally decentralized but I want it back on my blog. It’s pretty clear to me that this is where all of this stuff is going to have to go – partly for convenience, but also because that’s where the really interesting data/service mashups will most easily originate, I think. One thing I’ve been thinking about, though, is what this looks like on someone’s blog. I thing part of the barrier to this kind of thing is that the current state-of-the-art – widgets in someone’s sidebar or rich footer – is pretty marginally usable and definitely not scalable.

Lebkowsky on the Economist article on SocNets

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Jon Lebkowsky has written a response to The Economist’s article on Social Networks, Everywhere and Nowhere on the Social Web Strategies blog. Money quote:

For months I’ve been saying that Facebook is the next AOL – a gated community that works for a while, but ultimately can’t be open enough to sustain prominence. This is probably true of MySpace, too… at the moment, both systems are growing and capturing mindshare… will this last?

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