social networks

analysis of social relations emphasizing communications and evolutionary psychology

Applying Newton’s Third Law to human behavior: institutions have mass

Digital forms and ubiquitous networks are greatly increasing opportunities to circulate authored symbolic works. Digitization projects are creating huge online libraries of digitized books that persons around the world can access at zero incremental cost. Storage prices are dropping so rapidly that one small device will soon be able to store all the music that … Continue reading Applying Newton’s Third Law to human behavior: institutions have mass

social networking success

Dogs and cats are probably more important than Second Life to the future of the internet. While major media have hyped Second Life, the number of concurrent online users of Second Life rose above 20,000 for the first time on December, 29, 2006 (oddly, “peak concurrency” reportedly was 25,000 about a week later). The CEO … Continue reading social networking success

unsocial non-networks

Most blog posts did not include any links. A recent study selected 44,362 blogs in a way biased toward finding linked posts. Among all 2.2 million posts in those blogs in August and September of 2005, 98% of the posts had no incoming or outgoing links.[1] This isn’t a matter of A-List bloggers exclusivity or … Continue reading unsocial non-networks

systematized personal recommendations

User-to-user recommendations within a large online retailer’s recommendation system generated a very small share of sales. With keen business sense (see Netflix) and with praiseworthy regard for the common intellectual good, this retailer allowed some experts to analyze freely a large database of its users’ recommendations and to publish publicly their analysis. The database includes … Continue reading systematized personal recommendations