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The day before GOR 2006 started, there were a couple of pre-conference workshops going on. I participated in two of them; first Chris Snijders gave a general overview on "Social network analysis and its application to Internet research" and then went on to answer various questions about SNA - he actually helped me clear some points about my ongoing research on the blogosphere, great!
Marc Smith (Head of Community Technology Group at Microsoft Research) gave the second workshop on "visualization of online social networks" and presented various tools for, what he called, ‘data mining in social cyberspaces’. He started with Netscan which helps analyze and visualize social activitites, conversations and networks in usenet newsgroups. While presenting some fascinating visualizations, he made an interesting statement: "This is the area of threaded conversation", referring to services like the Usenet, Web boards and Mailing Lists, where conversations center around certain topics and run in form of "message" - "replies". Of course, there are other conversation modes - most notably Weblogs, where conversations might be threaded (think of the comments on one particular posting), but also take the form of distributed conversations (see, for example, this paper by Lilia Efimova and Aldo de Moor).
Marc then went on to present SNARF, a plugin for outlook that employs a different approach to sorting/displaying E-Mail - rather than putting emphasis on recency, SNARF helps sorting E-Mails with respect to the social relations one has to its sender. For example, it will show unread mails from those people you communicate often with on top of your incoming list. What makes it interesting to researchers: SNARF can be configured to send data about communication network patterns (varyiing degrees of anonymity can be applied) to a central server where these data sets could be merged and analyzed in whole (raising a lot of ethical/privacy issues, of course). At the end of his talk, Marc briefly mentioned AURA and SLAM, two projects which combine mobile communication and social networking services.
What is going to be interesting: right now a lot of these tools are basically for researchers, but the long-term goal is to make them available for end users, to aid orientation within social spaces that consist mainly of communication and right now give only limited clues about the presence of others or about their communicative acitivity.
[…] But you don’t attend a conference for the weather, so here we go: It’s tuesday morning, and I’m sitting next to Roland Abold and Andrea Handl at the opening session of the GOR 06 conference. Marc Smith is giving his keynote on "Social networks of the digital individual: Visualizing computer-mediated social interaction". Rather than presenting specific Microsoft research tools as he did in his workshop, he’s outlining general trends in the field of ’social software’. For example, he stressed recent developments of MoSoSo ("this is NOT a cocktail with fresh mint, but Mobile Social Software") - systems combining social networking features with mobile communication, taking further steps in the direction of ubiquitious computing applications - for example, AURA ("mobile object annotation system") or "blogjects".An inspirational talk, for sure. Marc did a great job to stress the importance of social aspects of internet use: patterns and structures emerge which contextualize or frame individual usage; for example, it might help sorting and evaluating information if you get indicators of the social context of your actions displayed. I’d love to discuss these topics later on today at the session on weblogs, or tomorrow at the Social Software session… […]
[…] Listening to Marc Smith, both at the pre-conference workshop and his keynote. While we bumped into each other quite often during sessions, it was only shortly before I left for my train that I actually got a chance to talk to him briefly. He told me that he was leaving for Enschede that afternoon, together with Ton and Andrea, to meet with Lilia Efimova and other folks at the Telematica Institute - too bad I didn’t know that before; I’m looking forward to reading more about their discussions. […]
Fachtagung 2006: Social Skills durch Social Software in Salzburg…
NotizBlog
Social Skills durch Social Software
23.05.2006 - 25.05.2006 Erweitert die Verwendung neuer Internet-Technologien in Lehr-, Lern- und Wissensprozessen auch soziale Kompetenz? Mit dieser Frage befasst sich die interdisziplinäre Fachtagung, die …