A couple of days ago I finished writing my Master Thesis. The subject was Attention and Participation in the Social Web. You can read and edit the theoretical approach on the wiki of the Thesis.

1. The first part of the work was a theoretical model, explaining how the attention economy works on social networks. It combined a variety of disciplines from sociology, mass psychology to network theory and emergence.
2. The second part was, actually, the blog you are currently reading. For almost 2 months I have been trying to apply the theoretical model I constructed on this blog. A couple of days ago, I finished writing the analysis of the results.

Read/Download the results

This analysis is posted in an extensive post called “Bending the Web” at superbloggingtips. It consists of:

• my approach on specific subjects (new content, perfection, participation, etc.)
• the results of my attempts on these subjects
• all kinds of statistics of the blog (comments, pageviews, unique visitors, subscribers, social networks, participation, etc.)
• my remarks on the attention economy of the blogosphere

You can also download the complete master thesis on social networks [pdf] (the theory and the analysis).

Your role on my Thesis

As I note in my conclusion of the article, your assistance is now of utmost importance to complete my research.

In an individual level the statistical results of the blog might seem encouraging; but I don’t have any comparison with any other blogs. Would the statistics seem so interesting if they were compared to other 2-month-old blogs? How was your traffic during the first months of your blog?  

I have expressed before my belief on Gladwell’s tipping point. I just found a very interesting post on the tipping point, where Duncan Watts (network thoerist, wrote ‘Six Degrees’) poses his disregard on Gladwell’s thesis. Take a look at it, it is very thorough and well argumented.

In other news, I will probably not submit any new post for the next days, since I’m finishing my master thesis. I’m planning though, a post on the semantic web. I think I’ll have it ready on Monday. So see you then.

Think of the social web as a huge town.
Like each town it has central squares, where many road lead. It also has central authorities, which have enough connections to direct you almost everywhere. Finally, like any city it has your friends, acquaintances but also people you hardly know. Depending on who you know (the mayor, a police officer or a salesman), you can get some jobs done much faster, while others require days and days of hard work.
But if you have the right connections and know which roads to follow, the town lies in front of you, like an open book.
The best way to learn your way around this city (and any city) is to have a map of it.
This is a list of static and interactive tools, which will reveal how the town called social web work. The static tools are mostly visuals of well-known social networks. The interactive tools are free software, which will let you study your own social networks.
Purpose of this list is to provide the instruments to help you decode the social web. Maybe if you try a hard enough and read between the lines, you’ll understand how the social web is connected.
Now you have the tools to find who are the hubs in your networks.

Static Tools

Les Miserables: The network of interactions between major characters in the novel Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, divided in 11 communities represented by different colors.

Flickrland: Network analysis of the Flickr population, based on data collected on March 14th, 2005.
Vizster: Vizster is an interactive visualization tool for online social networks, allowing exploration of the community structure of social networking services such as friendster.com, tribe.net, and orkut.
Enron’s email pattern: This graph produced by The New York Times reveals a map of a week’s e-mail patterns in May 2001, when a new name suddenly appeared.
Mapping the new testament: One of hundreds of interesting visualizations in Many Eyes is the Map of social relationships in the New Testament.
Data Visualization of a social network: Different aspects of a real life social network.
The spread of obesity in a large social network: The prevalence of obesity has increased from 23% to 31% over the recent past in the United States, and 66% of adults are overweight. In order to better understand this phenomenon, the authors in this study performed a quantitative analysis of the nature and extent of the person-to-person spread of obesity as a possible factor contributing to the obesity epidemic.

Steroids network in major league baseball: Sen. George Mitchell’s 409-page report on performance-enhancing drugs in baseball describes a thriving underground market for steroids and human growth hormone. This is a visualization of Mitchell’s report.

Interactive Tools

Fidgt: A Social Networking Address Book, which keeps track of all your friends and their media across different social networks (flickr, last.fm, msn messanger and other network supported).
Social Circles: Social Circles intends to partially reveal the social networks that emerge in mailing lists.
LJNet: LJNet is an interactive visualization of LiveJournal.com (LJ) members’ social networks. It shows the friends and friends of friends of any given LJ member.
TouchGraph: Another LiveJournal visualization tool. Now for Facebook too.
Email Constellations: This project aims to be a free, flexible, and easily modifiable visualisation tool that allows a user to intuitively understand their online social group structure.
Tracking the threat: TrackingTheThreat.com is database of open source information about the Al Qaeda terrorist network, developed as a research project of the FMS Advanced Systems Group.
Map of MySpace Friends: This is a simple force-directed graph that maps the relationships between myspace users.
Comment Flow: Building upon a traditional force-directed network layout consisting of nodes (profiles) and edges (friend-links), the system shows the activity and the information exchange (postings in the comment box) between nodes, taking the sequence and age of the messages into account.
Mapping the digg community: Using the Digg API, Brian Shaler created a map of Digg users and how they’re connected to each other.
Facebook friend wheel: colorful wheel that maps all the links between Facebook friends.
Nexus: Nexus is a friend grapher for Facebook built on Graphviz twopi and neato. It calculates friend similarity by parsing profiles (through the Facebook API), and highlights links between friends who share interests and groups.

IT IS UNOFFICIALLY OVER.

I’m done writing my Master Thesis. The subject is Attention and Participation in the social Web.

A subject, which interested me in several posts of mine in this blog, as some of you might have noticed. A question, that is in every blogger’s mind:

When there are so many blogs out there, how do I get attention to my blog?

And I don’t mean, these “33 Ways to increase your blog traffic”. I find these posts very useful, don’t misunderstand me. They are speaking from experience. But, my main point in this thesis was to approach these questions more…well…scientifically.

My Problems

The issue, that occured to me while writing was, that many disciplines are involved in understanding and decoding the blogosphere and social networks in general: Sociology, social psychology, mass psychology, network theory, emergence, media studies.

Due to limited time (and pages), I had (and have) the feeling that I approached each discipline only at the surface. That before getting deeper into a subject, I got out and continued with another. I didn’t get to the core of each field. I saw each study, only from the perspective of attentiveness. Logical you might assume, since any other approach would abstract me from my main subject. But, still it is a worry I have.

The Wikilutions

That’s why (before presenting the thesis to my professors), I’m giving it to the public. So that everyone can read it, see how this whole network works and give something back.

It would be absolutely selfish to just give a pdf document of the thesis and simply asking for feedback. It is of course an option (you can download the *pdf here), but primarily it is about interaction. So I have uploaded the whole thesis as a wiki.

The purpose of the wiki is twofold.

1. to create a database, explaining in ’scientifical terms’ the functions and structure of social networks.
2. to invite people from different disciplines to add to the project.

Read and Participate

• So if you’re the reading/printing type of guy: download the thesis as pdf here.
• If you’re more the participate/write/critic type of guy: join the wiki community here.

Your feedback and contribution will be highly appreciated

I came along an interesting site about the cartography of the web, called Mappa.Mundi Magazine.

The following study drew my attention:

Researcher, Young Hyun, at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) has started developing a graph visualization tool, with the code-name ‘Walrus’.

The illustration below, depicts an Internet topology, as measured by CAIDA’s skitter monitor based in London, showing 535,000-odd Internet nodes and over 600,000 links. The nodes, represented by the yellow dots, are a large sample of computers from across the whole range of Internet addresses.

Walrus is an interactive visualization tool that allows the analyst to view massive graphs from any position. The graph is projected inside a 3D sphere using a special kind of space based hyperbolic geometry. This is a non-Euclidean space, which has useful distorting properties of making elements at the center of the display much larger than those on the periphery. You interact with the graph in Walrus by selecting a node of interest, which is smoothly moved into the center of the display, and that region of the graph becomes greatly enlarged, enabling you to focus on the fine detail. Yet the rest of the graph remains visible, providing valuable context of the overall structure. (There are some animations available on the website showing Walrus graphs being moved, which give some sense of what this is like.) Hyperbolic space projection is commonly know as “focus+context” in the field of information visualization and has been used to display all kinds of data that can be represented as large graphs in either two and three dimensions . It can be thought of as a moveable fish-eye lens. The Walrus visualization tool draws much from the hyperbolic research by Tamara Munzner as part of her PhD at Stanford. (Map of the Month examined some of Munzner’s work from 1996 in an earlier article, Internet Arcs Around The Globe.)

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As Martin Dodge notes in the end of the article: this is not a real shape of the internet, since

There is no inherently “natural” shape when visualizing massive data, such as the topology of the global Internet, in an abstract space.

It is however a network, which visualizes how undemocratic the web is (in certain cases). Some yellow dots have much larger number of links, in comparison to some poor others.

Prashanth Ellina made a great work extracting topics using wikipedia data. Using the Graphviz program, he shows “…the wealth of information (both as text and as interconnects)” in wikipedia. The graphs are of incomparable complexity and might be not so easy to decode (see an example below, more high quality images in Prashanth’s blog), but remind me of some maps of the web I stumbled upon some time ago (the internet mapping project). It seems to me that even wikipedia obeys to power laws.

It makes me wonder: if some articles in wikipedia get more links than others, can this be considered as an authority breach? Are some articles considered more authoritative or just more popular?

Here is a link he suggests in understanding the interconnection between wikipedia categories.

Wayne Porter started a discussion today about a very interesting subject:

Is the web moving towards an organized, centralized network, where exchange of information will be under control?

In my previous post about ‘Torrentspy, ThinkSecret and the declaration of independence of cyberspace‘, I argumented that the recent development of the TorrentSpy, ThinkSecret and Yahoo cases show traits of such movement; Large corporations and governments silence popular blogs, torrent hubs and search engines. I quoted John Perry Barlow’s ‘Declaration of independence of the cyberspace‘ to advocate for the freedom of speech in the Web.
The role of decentralization in a scale-free network

I agree with Wayne, that decentralization (along with anonymity) is a very important key to guarantee freedom of speech and free exchange of data on the Net. Indeed the Web is vast decentralized network, a fact that makes it robust in any attacks. Bringing some nodes down, will not effect the network as a whole.

But the Web is a scale-free network, which is defined by a power law distribution. Indeed, this suggests the strength of the system. But it doesn’t mean it is invulnerable. The work of Albert-Làszlo Barabàsi on the subject, arguments that scale-free networks are vulnerable when a specific number of their hubs goes out of service. The system’s interlinkage suddenly breaks down. This happens because hubs collect the biggest number of inbound and outbound links (The 80/20 Rule).

So, yes indeed decentralization can provide online users an uncontrolled environment. But if the hubs of the network were ever down, the network wouldn’t be decentralized any more. Actually, there wouldn’t be a network at all.

My conclusion

I know this is a far fetched scenario. The hubs are numerous and the web is enormous and extremely interconnected. But when governmental and other institutions attack Yahoo (a search engine hub), TorrentSpy (a torrent hub) and ThinkSecret (a blog hub), it just makes you wonder. I’m not saying that we are at a gates of a new era of web control, but I see some steps towards this direction.

There was the past days also a discussion (are you willing to pay taxes on your blog?) about applying taxes on the internet. Maybe this is just a way for the government to put her hands on more money, but I also see it as a form of regulation. [When you don't have money to pay for your blog, you are not allowed to talk].

Update: By the way check this one out: Could Fake Steve Jobs be about to go away?