SNA- Social Network Analysis

Nowadays, I'm learning SNA (Social Network Analysis) in Coursera with Prof. Lada Adamic (University of Michigan), and it's a fascinating course!

How is it related to my research?

Well, in many ways. For example, Adamic & Glance's important research from 2005: The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog. Or more recent research: Learning Analytics for Learning Blogospheres- Pham, Derntl, Cao & Klamma (2012). 

Here's the first assignment (of the SNA course): My Facebook Network, using Gephi - an exciting open-source network visualization platform.

You can see the 'Giant Component' (and other nodes in my network, which are not connected to the others).

And here you can see the centrality measure of 'betweenness':



LinkedIn created the basic map automatically (LinkedInLabs- InMaps):



For further exploration, I recommend the following items:

Video: Social Network Analysis- The Basics from 'GalaxyAdvisors', with basic vocabulary, professional associations, and interesting references.

Also, for extensive basic info: social network analysis presentation from Guillaume Ereteo.

Video from TED: Nicholas Christakis and his spectacular speech on The hidden influence of social networks. This video summarizes his & James Fowler's book: 'The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives - How Your Friends' Friends' Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do.'

I think it is a perfect example of the practical use of SNA.

Video from TEDxRiga: Valdis Krebs's dialog about Ending up on the Wrong Side of the Tracks. Additionally, I think this short presentation, by Alexander Semeonov, emphasizes Krebs's point: Social network analysis of hashtag usage during protest meetings.

  

David Easley & Jon Kleinberg placed their SNA Textbook online for free download: Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About A Highly Connected World. I think it's an important book due to its extensive materials and its interdisciplinary approach to understanding networks.

 

That's it for now. For closure, here's a nice guy to follow on Pinterest :-)



I can identify with that...

Unfortunately...

 

 

 

 

:-)

My "Like" Links - Post#1

It's been 10 months (!) since I published my first blog post with the everlasting question: "To blog or not to blog?"… Now I have decided that the answer must be: "To blog"!

When I thought about what I wanted to contribute to the world using this modest platform, I realized that during the day, every day, I read a lot (everything from news articles to academic studies). So, I decided to create a new section of posts called: links with my "Like."

I'll focus more on the news coverage and less on the academic publications in order to maintain a wide variety of topics (unlike the narrow ones that are included in my Ph.D. research). I'm hoping to post a new piece every two weeks or so, collecting the articles I liked the most.
This first post is exceptional because I have accumulated several links in the past months (the links are sorted from the newest to the oldest. HEB = in Hebrew).

Hope you'll like my posts & find some interesting topics to think about :-)

• Six degrees of aggregation: How The Huffington Post ate the Internet. Columbia Journalism Review- Michael Shapiro (May12)

• The Science of civil war: What makes heroic strife- Computer models that can predict the outbreak and spread of civil conflict are being developed. The Economist (21Apr12)

• Behind the scene of the Internet hits: Why is everybody talking about KONY? Calcalist- Omer Kabir (4Apr12)- HEB

• Many Voices, but Still One Times- The tension between individual journalists' social media expressions and their employers' established standards. The New York Times- Arthur S. Brisbane (18Feb12) 

• A Newspaper, and a Legacy, Reordered: The Washington Post Recast for a Digital Future. The New York Times- Jeremy W. Peters (11Feb12) 

• Are Silicon Valley tech bloggers truly objective? Los Angeles Times- Michael Hiltzik (22Feb12) 

• Twitter- Year in review. Especially- Hot topics (Jan12)

• My 10 years of blogging: Reflections, Lessons & Some Stats Too. GigaOm- Om Malik (26Nov11)

• Separating You and Me? 4.74 Degrees. The world is even smaller than you thought. The New York Times- John Markoff (21Nov11)

• Study shows that 50 percent of consumed tweets come from one of 20k influential users. TNW- Sherilynn Macale (3Oct11)

• Audience Analysis of Major News Accounts on Twitter- Comparing @AJEnglish/@BBCNews/@CNN/@TheEconomist/@FoxNews/@NYTimes. SocialFlow- Gilad Lotan, Devin Gaffney, Cherie Meyaer (Aug11)

• Israel: The Start-Up Nation taking on Silicon Valley. The Telegraph- Emma Barnett (21Jul11)  

• Newspaper Extinction Timeline- Further explanation. Trends in the Living Networks- Ross Dawson (18Nov10)

"To Blog or Not to Blog?"

For Years, I have been following blogs on a daily basis, examining the phenomenon with great interest… as expected from someone who researches the field.

The question that I've been asking myself & have been asked by others was: "Why don't you open your own blog?"

My answer always was: "Since I'm a prolific writer and lean to perfectionism and obsessively following the 'beat of the net,' I can do blogging, but then I'll have no life. Instead of dealing with my Ph.D. research, I'll only operate the blog".

And then, I got this task in the framework of the course "Information Technologies": Build yourself a website using HTML. Well, I did it.

For a not so technical person like me, it was a challenge… so I sat down and read explanations on the web and developed, step-by-step, not an impressive design, but it ultimately came out nice and modest. The experience led to my decision: to start a "real" blog.

Here comes the first post… and I'm still struggling with Shakespeare's question:

Shakespeare

Let's wait and see…