Graph your Facebook friends

Bernie Hogan is my new hero.  He has written  a lovely little app that allows you to extract your Facebook network in a format that you can use in GUESS or UCINET.

My Online Network.

Network Liabilities- Citigroup Pays for a Rush to Risk

The Reckoning – Citigroup Pays for a Rush to Risk – Series – NYTimes.com
But many Citigroup insiders say the bank’s risk managers never investigated deeply enough. Because of longstanding ties that clouded their judgment, the very people charged with overseeing deal makers eager to increase short-term earnings — and executives’ multimillion-dollar bonuses — failed to rein them in, these insiders say. [my emphasis]

This NY Times article points out that the normal risk management controls at Citigroup that should have reined in exposure to CDOs [collateralized debt...] were thrwarted.

By?

“ties that clouded judgment.”

I suppose that is a network liability.  Every organization is cris-crossed  with network ties.  The question is why these had such an impact.  Org Culture?  Greed?  Something structural in the network?  The technology of communication?

PhD in Social Network Analysis

Maybe there are former students out there who check up on me…

Anyway, here is the skinny on a PhD program staffed with some pretty big names (and nice people to boot!).

LINKS, the International Center for Research on Social Networks in Business at the University of Kentucky, has openings for students in our Ph.D. program in business administration, with an emphasis on organizational research from a social network perspective. The openings are for Fall 2009.

Our research emphasizes examining organizational behavior and strategy from a network perspective, and our faculty and students publish extensively in the major management journals. Students are trained to become faculty at research-intensive business schools worldwide. Network-oriented faculty include Steve Borgatti (theory & methodology; knowledge management); Daniel J. Brass (power, ethics, innovation, technology), Giuseppe “Joe” Labianca (conflict, group social capital), Ajay Mehra ( individual differences; performance), Ikenna Uzuegbunam (strategy and innovation management; entrepreneurship), and Leslie Vincent (marketing and innovation),

The application deadline is February 1, 2008, but early applications are encouraged for full consideration. Please visit http://gatton.uky.edu/Programs/PhDBA/ManagementArea.html and contact Ajay Mehra (ajaymehra1@gmail.com<mailto:ajaymehra1@gmail.com>) to learn more about our Ph.D. program.

Steve Borgatti, Chellgren Chair & Professor LINKS Center<http://linkscenter.org/> for network analysis of organizations Dept of Management, Gatton College of Business & Economics University of Kentucky 550 S. Limestone St., Lexington, KY 40506-0034 Office tel: +1 859 257 2257, Mobile tel: +1 978 394 2787

Email: sborgatti@uky.edu<mailto:sborgatti@uky.edu>, steve.borgatti@gmail.com<mailto:steve.borgatti@gmail.com

Soc Net Books to Explore

Charles Kadushin sent out an email awhile ago asking for reviewers for Social Networks.  i would love to see the network folks sink their teeth into the explosion of general audience/practitioner books out there.

he listed the following at the time as possibilities:

Social Networks and Marketing, by Christophe Van den Bulte and Stefan Wuyts, Marketing Science Institute, 2007.

Andy Sernovitz and Guy Kawasaki, Word of Mouth Marketing: How smart companies get people talking. Kaplan Publishing, 2006 Mark Hughes, Buzz Marketing, Penguin 2006 Dave Balter and John Butman, Grapevine: the new art of word-of-mouth marketing. Penguin 2005.

Add Seth Godin’s Tribes: We need you to Lead us (2008) to the list.

WOW and SNA

Stumbled into a paper of networks of players, guilds in World of WarCraft [WOW].  Visual complexity had the image.

U Mich researchers map PVE interactions.

This led to a paper that is worth looking at to see how they extracted the data for the network analysis.

Indirect Social Influence

SOCIOLOGY: Indirect Social Influence — Denrell 321 (5885): 47 — Science
To learn more about these mechanisms, we need to broaden studies of social influence and belief formation to include the phases of learning and information collection that precede decision-making and judgment.

The above quotation from Science summarizes a brief yet interesting overview of how indirect influence matters.  The gist is that the exposure I have to infomration, as a result of my network connections or position, can bias my “rational” decision-making.  Its not that we are all weak-willed lemmings who do what the joneses do, it s that in the face of difficult to find information, we may rely on information gathered through netwokr ties to make decisions.  And by separating network effects into direct influence on disposition and indirect influence though information gathering, we can better analyze influence.

Fine.  Seems a bit of a round-about way to get there, but I suspect it makes network effects more palatable to economists or game-theory types.

Social Networks gains another level of salience

While over at socnet, there is a discussion of how “social networks” has become totally co-opted and stolen by the rise of the social networking sites/services (MySpace, Facebook, Okrut, LinkedIn, etc), i stumbled on to the new HP TouchSmart computer marketing campaign.  By the way, the author of the post above, Guy Hagen, is totally correct that social networks are as old as the species while SNS are, well, younger.

(I wonder what is the first SNS?  Orkut?  Tribe.net? It would be nice to have a brief history of SNS.  What would minimal definition be?  Profiles+relationship building+messaging system… Is that enough?)

The HP touchSmart, which looks pretty cool, bills itself as the one machine that will enable you to manage your digital life.  “It puts your digital life at your fingertips giving you instant access to info, entertainment, and social networks.”  So, not only has social networks as a term become a whole genre of applications, but even a class of functions like photography, word processing, or data management.

Applied SNA-ASNA 2007 // Call for Papers

ASNA 2007 // Call for Papers
ASNA 2008 will primarily provide an interdisciplinary venue with focus on applications of social network analysis; however, submissions on theoretical and methodological issues regarding SNA are also welcome.

I don’t know how many times I can bounce over to the EU in the Fall, but this looked interesting.  I have been itching for awhile to get a better handle on applied SNA.   Outside of Valdis Kreb’s InFlow and Rob Cross’ Network Roundtable (and The company Visible Path), I don’t know much about applied SNA over here.

I should find out what kinds of meetings are over here of this nature.

Discussion from Socnet on Organizing and Networks

Here is Blyden Potts’ response to a socnet query bout who first started refering to organizations as networks…

It seems to me that asking the question the way your friend does
misunderstands the nature of the issue.
Social organization means patterns of social relations, and any pattern of
social relations is — or at least can be understood as — a social network.
Social networks are not a “fundamental form” of social organization, they
are a way of conceptualizing any and all social organization.

If your friend’s desire is to argue that people are organized in social
networks no reference to any literature would seem to be needed. It is
essentially tautological to say that people are organized in social
networks, a bit like saying the weather is organized meteorologically, and
if it really needs to be demonstrated then why not ground it directly in
empirical examples? The “new era” discovery of social network research was
not finding a new way in which people were organized. It was in finding a
new way to conceptualize and analyze whatever ways people are organized.

I think your friend would do well to reframe his approach from understanding
social networks as a type of organization, which it is not, to understand
social networks as a way of thinking about social organization, which it is.

And I would think Barnes would be a good example of an early work that lays
the foundation for the network way of thinking about social relations:

“Each person is, as it were, in touch with a number of other people, some of
whom are directly in touch with each other and some of whom are not…. I
find it convenient to talk of a social field of this kind as a network.* The
image I have is of a set of points some of which are joined by lines. The
points of the image are people, or sometimes groups, and the lines indicate
which people interact with each other. We can of course think of the whole
of social life as generating a network of this kind. For our present
purposes, however, I want to consider, roughly speaking, that part of the
total network that is left behind when we remove the groupings and chains of
interaction which belong strictly to the territorial and industrial systems.
… what is left is largely, though not exclusively, a network of ties of
kinship, friendship, and neighborhood. This network runs across the whole of
society and does not stop at the parish boundary.”  (p.43)

*Barnes’ footnote for “network” makes clear he is talking about an “image”
and “convention” for depicting social relations, not some particular KIND of
social relation.

Blyden Potts

Its a great quotation to have of Barnes.

I thought Simmel did some early conceptual framing… but i never got around to reading Simmel.  :<)

Barry Wellman’s original query:

From the Cyborg Desk: Warning sounded over ‘flirting robots’

Warning sounded over ‘flirting robots’ | Beyond Binary – A blog by Ina Fried – CNET News.com
A program that can mimic online flirtation and then extract personal information from its unsuspecting conversation partners is making the rounds in Russian chat forums, according to security software firm PC Tools.

I hope there is a way to test yourself. Seems further proof that alst year’s sci fi is next year’s sci reality.  Hal must be smiling wherever he slumbers.