Spring Research Conference at BYU

Here are the slides form the presentation that I gave at the Spring Research Conference at BYU last weekend.

Network Roles

Social networks tend to have people that fill positions within the community. For example, within an academic community the roles of being a professor or a student can sometimes be identified solely by using the directed interactions among the individuals. To perform such an analysis, some measure of equivalence is used. In Social Network Analysis by Wasserman and Fauts, the following definitions of equivalence are reviewed (each with a note):

1. Structural Equivalence - requires identical ties to other identical actors
   
2. Automorphic and Isomorphic Equivalence - requires identical ties to other actors
   
3. Regular Equivalence - actors have identical ties to and from equivalent actors
   
4. Local Role Equivalence - actors are role equivalent if they have the same role sets
   
5. Ego Algebra Equivalence - based on algebra of relational structuresSo, why is knowing how to use this important? Well, say you would like to better understand the network surrounding your blog by learning which other blogs are similar in their ties as you, then this is how you could do it.

Blog Posts Increasing and Cyclic

During the span of a year, the over 200 blogs aggregated above show very cyclic behavior. It shows very prominently that these bloggers post significantly more posts during the week rather than on the weekends.

Additionally, as time went on, these blogs as a group posted more frequently.

I would guess that the sink during December was caused by the Christmas holiday.

Building Community around a Blog

At the spring research conference I presented the following:


















Building Community around a Blog (PDF)

Google Chatback

Google just released a new gadget that will allow people visiting your blog or website to chat with you (via Google Talk). It is like the live chat and call-back buttons that have been available previously. To set it up, all you need to do is add the chatback badge code to your blog. Then, it'll look something like this...

Topic Tool

Today, I put together a web page topic tool by using the web service that Nathan Davis made available. The tool takes in one or more web pages (i.e., a list of URLs) and then extracts the topics given the text on the web pages. The topics, or more accurately, the most likely topic components are extracted using an algorithm called Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA).

One potential use is for quickly generating blogger profiles to be used for implicit affinity networks. You can try it out at:

http://dml.cs.byu.edu/matthewsmith/tools/topictool/

Nathan uses his web service to make the query expansion service for Google searches called GooEgg.

Top Social Networking and Blogging Sites

Nielsen Online released the top Social Networking sites (ranked by unique audience), as follows:MySpace still leads the pack this year, yet Facebook grew at an astounding rate of 72%, proving to be the "hottest" of the Top 5.

Top Blogging sites were as follows, as of December 2007:Google backed Blogger continues to have and add the most unique audience.

For more information, try this or either of these related reports.

What is a Blog?

Much or our recent work has been focused on the Blogosphere, which refers to the growing social network of people that write blogs, or web logs. We explore the social capital found in these networks of bloggers. Here is a little screencast that explains what blogs are and their relevance in today's world.