Social Networks

Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.

A Digital Dunbar's Number

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 07/02/2007 - 23:24

MyBlogLog Graph, originally uploaded by Aldon.

Today, I started building up another map of connections in MyBlogLog. It rapidly got overwhelmingly large, but I’ll include it anyway. As I surfed blogs, I stumbled across a post by Steve Hays, aka Methodius on MyBlogLog where he wrote about the tempest concerning MyBlogLog community owners being able to send messages to everyone in their community.

Apparently Meg in Australia is getting spammed pretty badly with this. She’s currently in 906 communities, so it is less surprising that she’s getting a lot of messages. Another person who is in 5,480 communities also complained about this new feature.

Steve goes on to write some interesting thoughts.

I think "community" means that one desires to interact with others in the community. If people join communities on MyBlogLog and similar social networking sites, they ought to be interested in the topics of the community and in interaction with the members. If they do not want to communicate, they should not have joined the community in the first place.

I like Steve’s thought there. I’ve had serious problems with spammers in the past, and so I’ve made it more difficult for everyone to add comments to my blog, but this is to make it so that we can interact without the noise of spammers. It is to make it so that we can communicate more.

Steve goes on to say,

I have difficulty in understanding the motivation for joining a community where one has no interest in anything the community is about. If you join a football club, and have no interest in football, why did you join?

This is where I differ from him a little. Why join a community or a club that you have no interest in the subject matter? Well, for me, it would be to expand my horizons, to meet new people. Just because I’m not interested in football, doesn’t mean I can’t be interested in people that are interested in football. I’m not a stay at home mom, but I learn a lot from stay at home moms that are part of MyBlogLog. But I digress.

Steve ties it all together with the comment, “One of the problems of electronic networking is that it can lead to communication without community.” I think that sums it up nicely. Some people do “seem to join communities just to see how many they can collect”. Some of this might be for ego reasons, to have a large friends list. Some of it might be for some sort of search engine optimization or efforts to get people to click through to their sites, and make a profit from advertising.

In the comments, it got a bit heated, with one person going so far as to ask, “are you trying to run a cult or a community?”

There are two places I would like to go to explore this further. First, is to explore why people use MyBlogLog or other community sites in the first place. I touched on this a little bit as I discussed the idea of collecting communities. It seems like Steve, myself, and others, want to use MyBlogLog and other community sites, to find interesting people to communicate with. As I noted above, that does not necessarily mean that we have to have common interests. If anything, we would all be better off if we spent more time speaking with people outside of our normal community of interests.

For me, this ties back to Martin Buber’s “I and Thou”. I want to communicate in a meaningful personal way with people I encounter online. There are others who seek an “I and It” sort of relationship. The interest is in collecting links and clicks, either for ego strokes, to monetize them, or perhaps for some other reason. I’m interested in communicating with these people as well, but also, primarily, from the “I and Thou” framework.

The second idea that comes to mind is that of Dunbar’s number, “the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships”. This is typically set at 150, based on the size of the neocortex. However, it doesn’t take into consideration that when you are working online, you can page in and out sets of people, so while your neocortex may only be able to maintain stable relationships with 150 people at a time, using a good digital rolodex, that number can expand considerably.

This raises a new question. Is there a Digital Dunbar’s Number? A number at which point you start getting overwhelmed with spam or declaring email bankruptcy? I suspect there is, and that it is greater than 150, and perhaps less than 906 or at least less than 5,480, based on the recent discussion. How do we find this Digital Dunbar’s Number and what do we do when we reach it?

Are there other things that we can pick up from these large groups, some sort of collective unconsciousness that is gathered from the impact of all of this communication? These are ripe areas to explore.

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Graphing MyBlogLog’s Large Unconscious Online Social Blogging Matrix

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 07/02/2007 - 13:30

MyBlogLog Graph, originally uploaded by Aldon.

Last night, as I was surfing blogs on MyBlogLog, I stumbled across blogs focusing on various forms of spirituality. I noticed a bunch of them had been visited by people interested in the Law of Attraction and in the Karma Sutra. These sites, in turn had been visited by people trying to sell jewelry or perfume on their websites.

It struck me that creating some sort of map of MySpace might be an interesting project. Initially, I thought of using a package something like Visio where I could draw diagrams and move pieces around at will. I searched for free open source software and thought for a moment of downloading Dia. It looks like an interesting package, but seems to be focused primarily computer diagrams like entity relationship diagrams and UML diagrams. Ideally, I’d like to find something a little more freeform. As I write this blog entry, I’m downloading a version of Dia which I’ll experiment with a little bit later.

I also installed Graphviz. Graphviz is a great open-source tool for graphing different types of networks. Like Dia, it isn’t as freeform as I would like, but it is incredibly easy to set up a graph. For example, setting up a directed graph in Graphviz can be as simple as this:

digraph g {
Hello -> World
}

So, I started recording my visits to sites on MyBlogLog in a text file. I set it up as a directed graph. My own site I set up as a blue box,

aldon [shape=box fillcolor=blue style=filled]

Then, for each site that has recently visited my site, I put in a directed link

aldon -> cityguide
aldon -> keeekeee
aldon -> dk2
aldon -> jyhrus
aldon -> topcat1
aldon -> sarahridgley
aldon -> jamsodonnell

When I visited a site, I added a line to mark it as a box. If it was a friend, I filled the box red. Of course every time I visited a site, MyBlogLog would list me as the most recent visitor, so all the sites should point back to me as a visitor.

The list became quite large very quickly, especially for people that had many people listed on their site. So, I edited down the list of unfollowed links for my first version of this graph.

Moving forward, I’ll probably do a few more graphs like this. I may end up doing a few more graphs like this. I may try to embed pictures into the graphs, or if I can set it up nicely, make it a clickable graph.

I’ve kicked around the idea of scraping MyBlogLog screens, but there are rumors of an API so I’ll probably wait for this. (Side note to any folks at Yahoo or MyBlogLog that read this, if you want to give me early access, I’d love to test the MyBlogLog api together with Graphviz)

Of course, all of this doesn’t get me to the mind map that I talked about at the beginning of this post. Perhaps the best way to do that would be to use tags. That is even further down the track, but starts getting into some of the most interesting parts, tracking the flow of ideas.

I read various blogs on MyBlogLog. Sometimes I’ll link to them. Other times, their ideas lodge themselves into my mind, mix with other ideas and eventually work themselves out into blog posts in some sort of large unconscious online social blogging matrix. Exploring this social blogging matrix is where things can get really interesting.

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Politics and change

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 06/15/2007 - 09:38

I’ve never been a big fan of polls and handicapping political races. It somehow seems that besides not being particularly accurate, it promotes an approach to politics and leadership that isn’t particularly beneficial for our country. Today, I read a few blog posts and a bunch of emails that has gotten me to think a lot more about this.

First, Jerome Armstrong has a post up suggesting the 2008 Democratic Nomination is Hillary's race to lose. Mostly, Armstrong was talking about the fake self-proclaimed "movement" that exhausts me of Obama. Is the race really already over?

One of the things that everyone talks about is how the polls, this far out, don’t really mean much. There are the standard comments about how well Lieberman was doing in the polls at this point in the cycle.

Well, I thought I would go and try to find some polls from around June 2003. I haven’t found any good national polls from June 2003, but one set of polls particularly caught my attention. It was the American Research Group’s New Hampshire polls for 2003. From January through July of 2003, John Kerry was in first place in the polls, with Howard Dean second. Some of this may well have been because they were both from neighboring states. During August through December, Gov. Dean passed Sen. Kerry, but when the votes were counted after the primary, Kerry won and Dean came in second. They were the only two that got delegates out of the primary.

Some of this may have been the results of Iowa, and ‘fladem’ has a diary up on MyDD about Iowa's impact on New Hampshire.

All of this takes me to a bigger question. What is it that we want out of our leaders? Some of this may have to do with looking at the polls and the results of caucuses. We want our leaders to be ‘winners’. Some of this may have to do with Obama’s movement. People want to be part of a winning team, a movement, a community, of some sort of group that they feel strong affinity to. Yet as others have pointed out, what some people really want, is to be part of a group bringing about meaningful change, and not just a ‘feel-good’ movement as Armstrong suggests.

This takes us to the issue of change. On a mailing list of group psychotherapists, I posed the question, "What happens when leaders admit their own failings? What would it be like if political candidates admitted they didn't know everything?" One person responded,

If they admitted this, as well as how they plan on compensating for it, such as an expert in the area they are not, proposed for their staff...I would feel more comfortable with my vote. However, I believe the old saying is true for most of the population...ignorance is bliss.

David Glyn went further,

Leaders don't create the posture of infallibiity - they fall in with, or succumb to it, because of the sense that stepping outside it is tantamount to stepping out of the recognisable field of political life. To create leadership in a different mold involves, not just leaders, but substantial parts of the groups they are seeking to lead achieving a shift of culture; to suggest otherwise, paradoxically, throws all responsibility and power back onto leaders.

This takes me back to the whole idea of transformational politics. In the 2004 Presidential Primary cycle, Gov. Dean frequently told his supporters, “You have the power.” His message of political empowerment changed many people and some would suggest the course of U.S. politics. He didn’t end up getting elected President, but he is now chairman of the Democratic Party.

In the 2008 cycle, it seems as if Sen. Edwards comes the closest to ‘stepping out of the recognisable field of political life’. He has admitted that he was wrong in voting for the Iraq War Resolution and is working hard to make amends for it. He is running a campaign that echoes Gov. Dean’s message of empowerment, urging his supporters to take concrete action now to change our country and not simply waiting for some new leader to get elected in 2008.

Has he stepped too far outside, or not far enough? Are there enough people seeking a shift in our political discourse? Will he follow Gov. Dean’s footsteps and change many people but not get elected, or will his efforts towards change, combined with Gov. Dean’s efforts and perhaps other subcurrents in our culture be enough to get him elected and bring about meaningful change?

By focusing on the horserace component of the political campaigns, we miss the opportunity to explore real change, which starts with each one of us.

(Cross posted at MyDD.)

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Political Social Media

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 06/11/2007 - 12:13

Over on Cat On My Head, Jaya writes about a ViralTags Blog Rank Boosting Experiment. She worries about whether or not this will boost her ranking, or if there are algorithms around that will cause it to have a negative effect. I suspect there is a little bit of both.

In particular, she encourages people to copy and past a large block of text. However, copying text as is, is one of those things that algorithms search for. If everyone writes their own version, it is more effective.

Also, the question becomes, how do you want to be ‘tagged’. ‘Cat on my head’ might not be the most useful tag. In my case, Orient Lodge is already the top listing for my blog. I don’t need more people coming to my blog searching for Orient Lodge. Drupal Themes and Smoking Jackets are also already key searches on my blog. What do I want?

Well, since it is limited to three words, I would like to see if I can get more people finding me if they search for something like Political Social Media. If I were really serious about search engine optimization, I would go and find the phrases that people search on most frequently that are close to that. However, for the time being, I’ll simply use Political Social Media.

One other concern: This has a certain about of MLM feel to it. People who get on board early are likely to get lots of links, others, down the road are likely to get much fewer links.

So, on to the idea. Add a matrix of links to a blog post of other people that are doing this. Copy the matrix from an existing site. The original idea and matrix can be found here. Copy the matrix, change the Host Tag to the three words that you want to use, and add their tag into the matrix, if it isn’t there already.

Most importantly, when someone adds a matrix, be sure to add them to your list. Then, spread the word.

Here is the current matrix:

Host Tag: Political Social Media

Important: Once I get a ping back from you (I promise to do the best I can), I will add your anchor text and the associated link you designate as “Host Tag” here, replacing one of the “ViralTags” from the matrix above. As more and more bloggers copy and paste this matrix, the more backlinks you will have with your anchor text. If everybody who copy and paste from your blog does the same, pretty soon this will spread and go viral. So, the sooner you participate, the more links with anchor text you will receive.

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Network Neutrality and Special Agreements

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 06/05/2007 - 14:47

It was a year ago, this coming Friday, that Senator Barack Obama put up a podcast about Network Neutrality.

It is because the Internet is a neutral platform that I can put out this podcast and transmit it over the Internet without having to go through any corporate media middleman. I can say what I want without censorship or without having to pay a special charge.

But the big telephone and cable companies want to change the Internet as we know it. They say that they want to create high speed lanes on the Internet and strike exclusive contractual agreements with Internet content providers for access to those high speed lanes.

I applaud him for those comments. However, an entry on techPresident, Did Facebook Play Favorites with Obama? raises some interesting questions.

While the Internet itself is a neutral platform, some sites can be much more important in getting your message out than others. Facebook is a good example of such a site. The techPresident article raises an important question of whether or not Facebook provided an unfair advantage to the Obama campaign. Where there ethical lapses or FEC violations?

I don’t know the details of what happened and I’m not a lawyer, so I won’t touch the FEC question. However, if the Obama team did have access to privileged information it raises some interesting questions about how it should have been handled.

During Gov. Dean’s 2004 Presidential bid, I worked with a bunch of volunteer programmers. We started off calling ourselves Hack4Dean, and later changed it to DeanSpace. We were working with Open Source software, in particular, Drupal. We had lively discussions about how widely or tightly controlled our developments should be shared. Many argued that the software could give Gov. Dean a competitive advantage and should not be made available to others. Hypotheticals were presented about whether or not people would feel comfortable with Republicans using the software.

I was always the idealist. Open software should be open. What matters isn’t the software, but what you do with it, and for that matter, what your choices about software say about you. I still have these arguments today and I can well see the other side.

If there was some sort of special agreement between Facebook and the Obama campaign, what does it say about Obama’s commitment to keeping the Internet a neutral platform? What does it say about his commitment to the ideals of Network Neutrality?

Perhaps nothing. I’m sure that is what the more fervent Obama supporters will say. Perhaps they are right. Yet the old idealist in me still feels a little uncomfortable.

(Cross posted at MyDD)

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