Social Networks
Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.
25 things about my friends In a Word Cloud
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 02/08/2009 - 18:02Over the past few days, the two most popular posts on my blog have been 25 things about me...tagged and Building a Twitter Status Cloud, so I decided to mash the two of them up.
My first idea was to take the 25 things that my various friends have written, code them for categories, and do some sort of statistical analysis of what people write about. However, I’m pretty swamped right now, so I thought I would do something a little easier.
My next idea was to randomly select twenty five things that my friends have written and use that to create a new blog post. With a little bit of editing to make it look nice and flow together, here are 25 things about my friends:
- When we lived in Red Lion, PA we owned a duplex. One half of the three story home is what we lived in, the other half made into 2 single apartments with an apartment in the back with our garage.
- We raised horses and hunting dogs when I was growing up, so I was taught to never get attached to an animal. That’s why I’m so aggravated with Mary: we went to a shelter (“you’re taking me out to breakfast, buying me a new microwave, and we’re getting a dog”) , and she picked out a sweet Redbone Coonhound who had been horrifically abused. All Beau needs is constant love and attention, and I’ve become hopelessly attached to the big goofball.
- I had to sit in the corner in kindergarten because I called the gym teacher a bitch. This was not because I knew what the word meant. His name was Mr. Rich, and I was simply coming up with rhymes for it. Nobody asked me why I was using that word before they sent me to the corner.
- A very fond childhood memory is going to my grandmother's lake house for 4th of July and having her take all of my cousins and I in her car to Sonic for fresh a lime slush. To this day it's my favorite beverage.
- My bench mark for the worst food would have to be beets and Sushi would be a very close second.
- Have only been to Italy only once when I was 18. My ancestors are from Finland, my maiden name is the 2nd largest seaport in Finland, so I would love to go and see the country for myself.
- My favorite pass-time is interacting with my friends on facebook.
- My favorite webpage, besides my own, is the Ooze. A close second would be Emergent Village’s webpage. I have been visiting these two webpages since their inceptions.
- Once on my lunch hour in Boston, I ran into Emo Phillips, literally.
- I once sang backup to John Denver.
- I've spoken with Sean Penn about mudslides and Madonna.
- Am dyslexic and couldn't read well until about 15. As for writing, I needed another 5 more years to get it right. Yet because I am so competitive, people around me had no idea. I've been always a voracious reader and total nerd with a capacity to remember every piece of information that tickles my fancy --whether useful or not.
- A friend of mine who has a masters in theater management tells me that I may actually be able to claim to have performed "on Broadway." I did a version of Animal Farm with a small troupe on a traffic island in the middle of the street. Apparently, depending on the number of people who passed and a few other measures like exact location, this may qualify for that vaunted distinction.
- I own a lot of books. Every room in my apartment—except the bathroom—has books. I live in a library. I have read the majority of them at least once. I know every one I haven’t read.
- Last three books I've read: Revolutionary Road, A Room with a View, and Nicholas and Alexandra.
- Which leads me to this point: In graduate school I taught myself how to surf and only came close to drowning twice.
- Since there wasn’t a doctoral program that suited me, I spent a year going to the North Carolina Central University School of Law at night. NCCU is a “traditionally all-black university”, was lead counsel for many of the great civil rights cases that went to the Supreme Court in the 1960s, and is the lowest-cost ABA-accredited law school in the country. I dropped out when I moved too far away to drive to class three evenings a week , and since I was paying for this myself, other schools were much too expensive since I never wanted to actually be a lawyer; I just wanted to study the law.
- I can pack for a trip in one day or less. It takes me well over a week to unpack after I return from said trip.
- I can tie a maraschino cherry stem in a knot in my mouth. I learned this from my dad before I turned 10. Now people ask me, "Your dad taught you bar tricks before you were 10?!"
- I avoid using the dryer whenever possible.
- I have held a wallaby in my arms. It wasn't a romantic thing, but it was awesome.
- I'm kinda worried about 12/21/12 but figure we will all know about it one way or another soon enough.
- The worst job I ever had was a Friday's waitress job in college. I went through the training with my closest friend and had a blast, and then on the first night out on the floor I quit after two tables.
- I proposed to my wife while she was in the Peace Corps, at the Hotel Colbert in Casablanca in Morocco. But, Casablanca isn’t really as romantic as it sounds. Later we traveled to the many romantic spots and I kept thinking, “Crap, this would have been a great place to propose!” I have a bunch of photos of those places, but have never told my wife that is why I took them – until now.
- Thinks Wiliams and Sonoma is heaven on earth.
As I thought more about this I thought it might be fun to take all of what my friends have done and create a word cloud of their things. As with my other projects, I used Wordle.net to generate the word cloud. Here is the word cloud I came up with:
Building a Twitter Status Cloud
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 02/06/2009 - 23:09Last week, I produced a word map of the statuses of the people I follow on Twitter. Willem Kossen asked if I could release the program under an open source license. Actually, I’ll do something I hope some of you will find even more helpful. I’ll produce it free, public domain, including my comments about how I put this together.
I actually started off trying to come up with some nice GraphViz images of various social networks I’m on. (For more about GraphViz, read my blog post Installing GraphViz in Drupal and Using GraphViz, a Brief Tutorial. You may also want to check out some of the GraphViz images I’ve uploaded to Flickr and a great Visualization of the Madoff Secruities “Feeder Funds”.
From my Flickr images, you’ll see that I like to create images of social networks using GraphViz, and I thought I would try to create an interesting image of my Identi.ca network. I like working with Identi.ca because it is open source and it uses open standards. For example, you can get my network on Identi.ca as a FOAF file. This is a standardized XML format that can easily be parsed.
In PHP, you can read a website, if you have curl installed fairly easily:
$ch=curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,'http://identi.ca/'.$target.'/foaf');
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$xmlstr = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
This little snipped of PHP opens a channel which I’m calling $ch. It goes out and gets the FOAF file for whichever $target I specify. The result is saved in a string called $xmlstr.
With this, you can then parse the XML into an easy to use structure using SimpleXML.
try {
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($xmlstr);
} catch (Exception $e) {
print "Skipping " . $target . "\n";
}
I use a ‘try’ around the calling of SimpleXMLElement in case the $xmlstr doesn’t contain valid XML. In my case, I just skip the records that don’t have valid XML.
The next part is where I’ve always needed to explore a little bit to make sure that I get the right syntax. XML documents can be multiple levels and they get mapped into structures within structures within structures in PHP with the SimpleXMLElement function.
In this case, the information about the first person in the FOAF document can be found as
$xml->Person[0]->holdsAccount->OnlineAccount->accountName[0];
The people that the person knows can be found by incrementing the index of Person. So, I wrote a loop to go through the structure and write out all the relationships in GraphViz format. I also built a list of other FOAF files to extract the relationships so I could get additional degrees of separation.
Unfortunately, I have a lot of friends on Identica, and most of them have lots of friends as well, and the graph became unmanageable. I kicked around building some filters to only track special friends, but didn’t come up with anything good, so I set aside the identi.ca graphing.
MyBlogLog also provides FOAF files. In addition, the MyBlogLog FOAF files includes links to other services that users have specified. Unfortunately, the MyBlogLog FOAF files does uses namespaces which complicates the parsing. In addition, I probably have even more friends on MyBlogLog than I do on identi.ca, so I set that aside.
Which takes me to Twitter. Twitter also gives you the ability to extract information in XML. As an example, you can get my most recent 100 friends on Twitter, including their name, screen name, location, description, and most recent status. For the status, there is information such as what it says, when it was created, what tool was used, etc.
As I noted, you can get up to 100 friends worth of statuses at a time. If you have lots of friends, you need to loop through all of them.
So, I used the curl and SimpleXML processing above, together with some extra looping to pull all the statuses. With that, here is the PHP program that I used:
<?php
$page = 1;
while(1) {
$ch=curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,'http://twitter.com/statuses/friends/ahynes1.xml?p
age='.$page);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$xmlstr = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);try {
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($xmlstr);
} catch (Exception $e) {
exit;
}$i = 0;
$uname = $xml->user[$i]->name;
if ($uname == '') exit;
while($uname != '') {
$status = $xml->user[$i]->status->text;
print $uname . " : " . $status . "\n";
$i = $i + 1;
$uname = $xml->user[$i]->name;
}
$page = $page + 1;
}
?>
As you can see, you simply put the name of the person you want in the URL and off you go. Caveats: You don’t need to login to Twitter to be able to do this, and you can do it for anyone, providing the people they follow don’t have their Tweets protected. However, you will get limited if you try to do more a lot of pages at the same time.
What I did was save the results to a file that you can wee here. The next step was to paste the text into Wordle.net I then took a screen print of the page and saved it as an image. I could probably search around for some other word cloud software and do that as part of the process, but this is good enough for now.
A minor change and this could be used to show the description of the people that I follow, or the people that follow me. Someone else has already set up a word cloud generator like that, and you can see the word cloud of the bios of people that follow me at TwitterSheep
So, with that, here is my Friday evening word cloud of statuses of the people that I am following, thanks to a little PHP using curl and SimpleXML as well as the word cloud software at Wordle.net:
SimpleXML PHP and Top EntreCard droppers
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 01/31/2009 - 12:41Today is a day that EntreCard has asked people to highlight those that have dropped the most cards on their site. It is easy to get this as an RSS feed, and I could have just done something like thrown it into the Drupal Feed Aggregator and put it up as a block. Or, I could have used one of many different widgets to highlight top droppers.
Instead, I’ve been playing with parsing XML with using SimpleXML in PHP. I’ll be writing more about this later. For the time being, let me present my top droppers, as retrieved as an RSS feed from EntreCard, formatted for this blog, along with some of my own comments.
Why Blog? Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 01/26/2009 - 15:34Last week, in a discussion about how to make sure that students are using the Internet in a safe and appropriate, the idea that everything one the web was put there with an agenda was brought up. The idea was that by helping children understand the agenda of the writer, the children could make better choices on what to do with the information posted.
I’m known in that group as a blogger, and it felt like people were wondering about my agenda in writing what I do online. I’ve often written about why people blog, but I thought it would be good to take another view at this, in the context of the agenda’s of the writers.
I glance at the tweets my friends are writing and at the top of the list is someone talking about the Cavs being undefeated at home so far this year. Yes, the person who wrote that had some agenda in writing it. It isn’t the same sort of grand agenda that people think about when they talk about making sure children understand the agenda of the writers of websites they visit, but it is part of the continuum.
Over on Facebook, a person writes about her frustrations of having to fix things breaking at home while money is tight during a recession. Again, there is an agenda there, but it is much different than the agenda of other sites.
Is there a good way to organize and think about these agendas? It seems like Abraham Maslow may provide some useful insights from his famous paper, A Theory of Human Motivation. We all have a hierarchy of needs, and what motivates us in what we write online is perhaps no different than what motivates us in other aspects of our lives.
The most primitive needs are physiological. We need food and shelter. Some people write for money, and some of that may simply be to put bread on the table, or simply to have a table that bread can be put upon. Amongst blogs, there are plenty of Make Money Online blogs. While they may be seeking money for other reasons as well, it seems like they fit in this category.
When you go to most online news sites, they are part of organizations that are trying to make money, via advertising to pay their staff. Again, this gets to those primitive needs of money for food and shelter, and also, perhaps, for a little bit more.
Any site that depends on advertising to make money is going to be concerned with visitors. They will want to give visitors what they want, entertainment, having their views reinforced, etc. They may claim to be ‘objective’, because that might be another quality that visitors are looking for, but it is about meeting basic physiological needs.
The next level up is safety needs. We all need to feel safe. In political blogs, we often find people talking about safety. How do we remain safe from terrorists? How do we remain safe from people that would do away with our rights for their own benefit? We send messages about accidents on Facebook and Twitter, perhaps, in part, to let other people know of dangers so that they can remain safe.
Beyond our needs of safety, we have social needs. All this talk about social media seems to point to our social needs. We need friendship and a sense of self worth. We get that by having friends follow us on social media and by letting them know what we are up to. In exchange, they let us know what we are up to.
Above this, in Maslow’s hierarchy, we find aesthetic needs. I visit some wonderful artblogs that seem to deal with this.
So, how does this relate to blogging as well as appropriate uses of the Internet? It seems like people worry about kids that disregard safety needs in search of friendship. I don’t think this is something specific to the Internet, and we need to help people, both parents and children understand the relationships between friendship and safety.
And why do I blog? Well, it would be nice to make a buck here and there, and I do hope that some of my writing helps me land good jobs from time to time. However, I also recognize that being outspoken can be a hindrance in meeting physiological and sometimes even safety needs.
I would like to think that my blogging serves some sort of good, some higher goal. For me, much of it is about getting people more involved in their communities and addressing problems of government that thwart that.
In the end, however, perhaps I don’t have a great clear reason why I blog. Perhaps many of us don’t. Nonetheless, I’d love to hear other bloggers thoughts about why they blog and how it relates to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Inauguration Reflections
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 01/20/2009 - 10:39In the background, CNN blares on the television. On my social network feeds, friends talk about how they are going to celebrate this day. I hear phrases like “this moment in history” and “a changed America”. I hear the stories of common people that have traveled great distances to be at the inauguration. CNN interviews people on the mall and various people break out into songs, old songs, folk song, songs remixed to become songs about the inauguration.
I listen to stories about the Metro stations being overwhelmed with passengers, and about the cellphone system struggling to keep up with all the volume.
What are you listening to, watching, or reading? What is your experience of this day?
Updates:
As I listen to various broadcasts, I hear people talking about the tradition of the inauguration and I think about it as a great symbol to other countries of what Democracy can look like.
Update 2:
My RSS feed updates Twitter and feeds out to other sites as well. On Facebook, I received three interesting comments:
Christine Cavalier at 11:01am January 20
Aldon I'm watching on CNN, combined with Facebook. It's awesome.
Deborah White at 11:02am January 20
My, how our lives have changed. I also have both TV and CNN/Facebook livestreaming, plus my Blackberry for email.
Joyce Bettencourt at 11:04am January 20
me too.. think these media mashups that also inspire a shared viewing experience are great :)
Update 3:
Recording a local inauguration party on Woodbridge Snow Cam
