ottobre 2010 – My CMS

IR11: Sustainability, Participation, Action

Last week I’ve been at the IR11 Conference (the annual conference of the association of Internet researchers) where I presented the SIGSNA research on the propagation of information in Friendfeed – starting from the analysis of the death of Mike Bongiorno – [see slides below].
IR11 was a great experience and aoir is probably one of the best academic group around within the area of internet studies. The overall quality of the conference was really high (special thanks to Torill – the program chair – for her great work ) and I had a chance to meet many great people doing incredible researches.
Among those I really would like to point out the Mapping Online Publics (at the Queensland University of Technology) and the Retro-V project (at the University of Washington). Check out what these guys are doing!

Information propagation in Microblogging Sites

View more presentations from Luca Rossi.

To whom are you speaking? Egonetwork over time

Last version of Gephi introduced some very nice feature. It is now possible to work with dynamic networks that can easily be observed in their evolution. Working with dynamic networks is crucial when you are dealing with social networks, like those existing in microblogging sites, that show a high level of variability: social connections quickly change over time and – even if the connection does not disappear – the use of a specific connection can be very different from time to time. Observing such a phenomenon could be difficult with a static SNA but with a dynamic perspective it becomes quite simple.

The movie shows how the egonetwork of my Friendfeed user changed within the period Aug. – Sept. 2010. The ego-node represents my user and the other nodes are all the users I’ve interacted with (on FriendFeed). Nodes with a higher level of interaction are visualised closer to the ego-node while users with a low level of interaction are pushed away from the ego-node.
The video span over two month of time with the data-resolution set at 10 days (this creates 5 different configuration of the network) and it clearly shows how closer nodes change even in such a short amount of time.
Even if this was intended to be just a demo of then new opportunities offered by gephi it provides some insights about how ego-networks evolve over time. This evolution can be due to endogenous or exogenous aspects but it seems to be quicker than what one could expect.L’ultima versione di Gephi permette finalmente la visualizzazione di reti dinamiche. Quella che trovate qui è una breve visualizzazione di come l’ego-network attiva di uno specifico utente (in questo caso il mio utente FriendFeed) è cambiata nel corso dei mesi di Agosto-Settembre 2010.

I nodi sono posizionati – rispetto al nodo centrale – in modo da rappresentare il livello di interazione: i nodi più prossimi sono quelli con un livello di interazione maggiore. Com’è possibile vedere i nodi più prossimi – ovvero i nodi con i quali in quel periodo ho interagito maggiormente – cambiano con un’elevata frequenza costringendo la rete a riadattarsi di conseguenza.
Oltre alla dimostrazione di alcune delle possibilità offerte dalla nuova versione di gephi questa breve visualizzazione ci permette di capire come i contatti con i quali interagiamo – pur all’interno di un numero sicuramente interiore rispetto all’insieme delle connessioni possibili – sono una realtà dinamica in costante evoluzione. Le ragioni di questa evoluzione possono essere le più diverse, da fattori endogeni alla rete (discussioni interessanti) a fattori esogeni (eventi esterni che desideriamo trattare con alcuni contatti).