Yesterday, I spent a little more time surfing around blogs with tools like BlogExplosion, MyBlogLog and related sites.

I came up with a new graph of MyBlogLog connections. The style of observation has a great effect on the graph created, so let me take a few moments to talk about this graph.

MyBlogLog will be releasing an API at some point to allow better access to the underlying data. Because of this, I’ve hesitated to build some screen scrapers, but building graphs can be tedious, so I looked a little bit at the data that gets returned. I deconstructed some of the javascript and built a routine that retrieved data, stripped out the key data and threw it into a primitive database. At some point, I’ll come up with a better cleaner procedure. Since this is not using a clearly defined API, the data I’m getting back may have some inherent flaws in it.

Essentially, I retrieved the four most recent visitors to a MyBlogLog user, for each new user found, repeated the process. After I had gathered information on around 350 users, I consolidated the data. I kept only those users that had both incoming and outgoing links and had at least two links going one direction or the other. Even as is, this produced a pretty big graph. I will leave interpretations of the graph to the readers.

As I surfed around, I found that Goldy had written about a previous graph I had created and some of her thoughts about the blogging community she has found herself part of. There are some wonderful comments on that post talking about this sense of community.

I also visited Kevin Makice’s blog, BlogSchmog, where he asks, Where is the Informatics incubator? He notes the Techcrunch article about Yahoo! and Google both working on next generation social network tools.

Google has partnered with Carnegie Mellon to work on Socialstream. Yahoo! is working on mosh. There is some talk about how ‘mosh’ will relate to Yahoo! 360. What isn’t talked about is how MyBlogLog, a Yahoo! acquisition will relate.

What also isn’t talked about is how efforts to have an open social network, based on tools like XFN, FOAF and so on fit in. In many ways, Facebooks Apps seems to be moving us, slowly and surely towards open social networks. Already, there is a Facebook App for Upscoop which links together different closed social networks.

Yet much of this focuses on the technology of social networks and not the social aspects. Back in 2002, I tried to get a bunch of people thinking and talking about the social aspects of social networks. Unfortunately, there weren’t a lot of people on social networks at the time and I never found critical mass.

I set up a site called GroupMine. You can still find it on archive.org. I put up some general thoughts and initial notes. They continue to percolate in the back of my mind.

One of my recent thoughts has been about the relationship between Group Relations theory, al a Wilfred Bion, Tavistock, the A.K. Rice Institute, and later work like Social Dreaming and Gordon Lawrence, and online social networks. This came back to me yesterday when I received a friendship request on Facebook from a person who wrote about having been to a social dreaming matrix with me at the White Institute in New York City back in 2002. It turns out that, according to Facebook, we have several friends in common.

Will my graphs of MyBlogLog interactions, together with reconnecting with old friends and old thoughts about the social side of social networks lead to something interesting? I sure hope so. Perhaps we need to explore what a social media matrix really means.