Social Networks
Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.
Traffic Patterns with EntreCard Adgitize BlogExplosion MyBlogLog and others
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 01/11/2009 - 17:40If you read many of the make money online (MMO) blogs, you will typically find recommendations to find a niche and stay in it. Like so many of other recommendations, I disregard it. I’ve configured my site to show the top seven categories that I’ve recently been writing in, and over time, they will shift, depending on what catches my interest. Today, however, I’m going to spend a little bit of time focusing on the make money online ideas. If that’s not your thing, please read some of the other posts below.
Another thing that the MMO folks talk about is trying to minimize your bounce rate. That is the number of times that people come to your site, look at a single page, and move away without clicking on anything. Personally, I like to have a high bounce rate. It means that people are finding what they want on their first visit.
One way to lower your bounce rate is to have more of your content ‘below the fold’. I usually don’t do that. However, if you want to learn about this, as well as about my experiences with what works and what doesn’t, click on Read more.
Second Life and the Future of ...
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 01/10/2009 - 13:18I’ve been pretty busy with other things and haven’t been in Second Life much recently. However, I’ve been getting a bunch of interesting emails about different developments related to Second Life and other virtual worlds, and I thought I should highlight some of them here.
… Education
One email that particularly caught my attention was the idea of building an Opensim / Moodle implementation, similar to Sloodle, but with some important differences from Sloodle.
Let me explain a little of this to people whose eyes glazed over as they read that. First, Second Life is a three dimensional virtual world. You run a Second Life client that connects you to a set of Second Life servers. You can move a representation of yourself around in this three dimensional virtual world and interact, real time, with other people doing the same thing. You can see videos, share course material and create objects in the world that you can interact with. You can go beyond whatever physical limitations hold you down in your physical life.
Opensim is a project to create open source server software that acts in a manner similar to Second Life servers. A person with a Second Life client could connect to Opensim servers that are available only to people within a certain community such as a place of business or a school.
I came to Second Life after having spent a lot of time working with text based virtual worlds. One type of text based virtual world is MOOs. I’ve been active on large MOOs, participated in educational MOOs and run my own MOOs. When Opensim first came along, I wrote about how with Opensim, schools could have their own three dimensional virtual worlds, just like how they used to have their own text based virtual worlds.
Moodle is a popular open source course management system, learning management system, or virtual learning environment, depending on who you talk to. I don’t know what sort of relationship there is between Moodle and the MOOs of old, but many of my education friends from MOOs seemed to get very interested in Moodle.
Sloodle is an open source project that integrates Second Life with Moodle. The problem is that Second Life is a close proprietary system, so the integration is limited. Since OpenSim is open source, the possibilities for deeper integration are much greater and much more interesting. However, Opensim is still in alpha testing and changes rapidly. This presents problems for deep integration because what you are integrating with may change significantly, and hence your integration may need to change significantly. Nonetheless, it is an interesting development.
A friend of mine teaches anthropology at Brandeis. Years ago, Brandeis had a MOO up and running that I would visit. When I finally got a chance to visit Brandeis, I knew my way around the campus fairly well from my explorations of their MOO. I would love to visit a Brandeis Opensim world someday in the future, or even a Beecher Road virtual world school. Integrating it with an Opensim / Moodle implementation would make it all the more compelling.
… Healthcare
One of the things that I’ve gotten the most out of Second Life has been becoming friends with people in the disability community there, and learning so much from them. There is a non-profit called Virtual Ability. Their “mission is to enable people with a wide range of disabilities to enter into virtual worlds like Second Life®, and provide them with a supporting environment once there.”
There is a wonderful blog post about health care in Second Life. In a recent email with Second Life educators about videos explaining Second Life, I recommended this video as a good starting point to get what Second Life can really be all about.
... and civic engagement
Then, today, I received a message via Identi.ca pointing me to another great video about health care and Second Life. This one was about people interested in healthcare talking together via Second Life and provides another great view of what Second Life, or related virtual worlds can do when used properly.
Whether your top issue is education, healthcare, civic engagement, or whatever other cause, it is crucial to find effective ways to communicate with others, and more and more virtual worlds, like Second Life are proving to be an important part of the mix.
Happy New Year!?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 01/01/2009 - 13:35Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit, Happy New Year, and all that stuff. The snow is bright white beneath the cold deep blue sky. In the background, I hear the Rose Bowl parade on television. My mind is a bit foggy due to an annoying head cold I’m trying to shake off.
There are many things I want to write about, thoughts about the year that has just ended, hopes for the year to come, and reflections on what it all means. Yet I can’t concentrate, so this may end up being a bit stream of consciousness.
2008 was not a great year. It was difficult for us financially, as it was for many of my friends. Yesterday, I listened to Colin McEnroe do his farewell show on WTIC. I twittered parts of it, and friends listened in to WTIC’s live stream of the show. Another friend has sent me an invitation to the Facebook group, Bring Back Colin McEnroe. Colin is one of the few media personalities in Connecticut that seems to get what is going on. He appears to understand the role of the media ecology and the relationship between print, radio and online.
It is becoming popular to talk about the convergence of different types of media in the newsroom, but there is another part of convergence that should be considered. Colin, like a few other media personalities that seem to get it, also teach at various higher educational institutions in Connecticut. This makes a lot of sense to me. I wonder how many people started in journalism in hopes of educating people about what is going on. It seems like a convergence that should be promoted and nurtured.
Later, last night, I received an IM from a friend that lost his job a while ago, and has not had any luck finding a new job. We chatted and neither of us had a lot of hope for the New Year.
I read some of @BlinkyStJames tweets and her blog Anywhere But Here: Chronicling near(?) homelessness. I highly recommend her writing.
Around midnight, I was twittering with friends. One person from the left coast, still waiting for New Year’s in his town, asked those of us on the right coast if 2009 was any different from 2008. I responded that while it is good to have 2008 done with, it feels like New Year’s won’t really be here until January 20th. I’ve seen many people echoing that thought.
As I tried to find words to describe 2008, I remembered an old Calvinist joke.
What did the Calvinist say when he fell down the stairs?
Thank God, that’s over.
I guess that captures a little bit of my feeling about 2008. So, what’s on tap for 2009? I’m really not sure. I’ve kicked around resolutions to make. One is to stop rolling my eyes or shaking my head in disbelief every time the President of the United States speaks. It is going to take a little work, but I suspect I should be able to achieve that in about three weeks. With Kim’s Lyme disease currently seeming to be under control, we are hoping to get back into a little better shape. Personally, I would like it if our family could go for more walks on some of the wonderful trails around Connecticut. I would like to work on some sort of Social Media Relationship Management system, and do a better job of nurturing my relationships in social media.
Yet for big resolutions, I’m still at a loss. It feels like I should make a Sisyphusian resolution, to enjoy the view of the boulder as it rolls back down the hill. Yes, I would like to make a difference, to somehow help people find their voices and get more involved in the public sphere, yet that boulder seems not to be budging very much.
So, there you have it, out with the old boulder and in with the new. What about you?
(Categories: )
A Social Media Year in Review
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 12/30/2008 - 18:49People around the world are looking back at what happened in 2008 and looking forward to 2009 and offering their reflections. I thought I would do it in terms of my online presence.
Back in May, 2007, I did an inventory of some of the social networks that I was active in. Today, I’ve done a similar inventory. Back then, it terms of connections, I was probably most active in Facebook. My number of connections has grown 346% since then. The network with the second highest number of connections was LinkedIn. My number of connections there has grown 189%. Yet both of these have been passed by what had been my third most connected network, Twitter.
The people following me on Twitter has grown 1624%, as Twitter has passed Facebook as the network with the most connections. I have nearly twice as many followers on Twitter as I do on Facebook now.
Other networks that have grown substantially have been MyBlogLog which has climbed past LinkedIn to be my third post connected network, and BlogCatalog, which is similar to MyBlogLog. The other network that has grown substantially has been Flickr which now ranks fourth. Two other sites that I suspect might have some growth over the coming days is StumbleUpon and del.icio.us, both of which people list in their MyBlogLog profiles, and I’m going through the MyBlogLog profiles of friends to see if I should add them on other networks. This gets to the issue of needing a social network relationship management program, but that is more than big enough to require a post of its own.
A few networks that I’m on have seen a decrease in connections. These include Orkut, Friendster and Ryze. None of these were networks that I was very active on, and the decrease isn’t a surprise. In fact, it helps illustrate an important point about social networks, while the number of nodes or connections in a social network may have some importance, what is much more important is the traffic on the network.
All of the social networks are interconnected in one way or another, and from that starting point, I looked at some of the statistics I have about my online activity. During 2008, I received well over 50,000 emails. This does not include spam emails or other emails that have no value and were deleted immediately. It also under counts because many emails that I receive from mailing lists are bundled into digests so I often receive one email that has up to fifteen emails inside of it.
Granted, it is hard to read that many emails and about a third of these emails never were opened. In response, I sent about 3100 emails.
On my blog, I’ve written about 650 blog posts this year, working out to be around 400,000 words. I also sent about 900 pictures to Flickr, 100 videos to blip.tv and over 2300 messages to Twitter, although some of them were automated messages from my blogs RSS feed.
I write about a wide variety of topics and I was interested in seeing which search terms brought the most traffic and which posts people found most interesting. In my case, 70% of the top searches were on peoples’ names. This was also reflected in the most read blog post of the year, which was about Victoria Lindsay, Erin Markes and Avery Doninger.
My second most popular post was about my role in the collapse of Lehman. Beyond that, the posts that got the most traffic, and also ended up having the highest Google Page Ranks were posts about my experiments with various forms of technology such as laconica, FriendFeed, OpenSim, SecondLife and the MyBlogLog API.
What does all of this tell us? I’m not sure, but it does seem like I should do some experimenting with establishing a Social Media Relationship Management (SMRM) system.
I hope you find this interesting. Let me know your social media experiences for 2008 and your thoughts about social media for the coming year.
First Friend Social Map
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 12/29/2008 - 10:14
At the Tweetup I attended this weekend, I met @dacort who had built a tool to find the first person you followed on Twitter. Back at home, I started playing with it. It is nice set up to trace through your twitter ancestry. As I traced who I first followed, who they first followed and so on, it struck me that this would make an interesting map, so I gathered data and loaded it into Graphviz. The result is the picture you see above.
A few interesting things to note: Many people ultimately lead back to @jack. @jack first followed @lane who first followed @jack. Four of the streams go through @missrogue to @jack and three through @factoryjoe. @biz is pretty far back in the structure, and he was first followed by @stevegarfield, @Scobleizer and @darthvader and @Scobleizer was also first followed by three people.
Another string leads to @ev, who does not lead back to @jack. @ev descendents include a lot of new media players. One string leads out of @macworld and has quite a diverse set of followers.
Some people first followed each other such as @kmakice and @amakice and @sheilamc7 and @mdhelfenbein. Both, I believe, are husband/wife pairs.
Most of the strings start off with someone that I’m following and I suspect that if other people did similar graphing, their results might be a bit different. I should also note that this was all done in a fairly manual process. If I had the time I could easily envision building an automated map generator, but I got enough information from this little exercise.
If you’re interested in expanding the map, send me any pairings that you have. Ideally, send it in Graphviz’s directed graph format, e.g.
ahynes1 -> etoile etoile -> gomer43 gomer43 -> superaleja
