13 Jan 2011

What to Do When You Find Something Cool on the Internet: A Flowchart

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In posting this to Posterous am wondering whether the service does provide sufficient credit to the originators.

5 Jan 2011

What if.. you've played so many board games over Christmas this is now the only way you can parse information?

Very clever interactive graphic from the Guardian showing how the major retailers did as if they were stops on a Monopoly board. One quibble -- when you click on 'Read more' you get taken out of the game, which seems a shame.

3 Jan 2011

Lessons from 'Connected' for online community managers

Lessons from 'Connected' for online community builders

‘Connected’ is a primer on social network analysis written by two US academics who believe it is impossible to explain many crucial human phenomena without understanding how social networks shape our behaviour. 

The book references anthropology and evolutionary biology to trace the roots of our social networking skills. It looks at the impact of networks on health, wealth, sex, money, and politics, and identifies a core set of dynamics that will make you wonder just how much of what you do is self-directed and how much is driven by your own social networks.

I found the arguments persuasive and was interested in the implications for those building online communities. But the book has broader objectives and has relatively little to say on this subject. So I’ve had a go myself.    

1. We’re hard-wired to network

Image: The Kuneguda Gallery

The creators of social networks show a surprising amount of interest in stone-age villages. The reason is that the evolution of the brain appears to have abruptly slowed at the point 250,000 years ago when we started settling in villages and human collaboration reached a new peak.

In most books on social networking you’ll see a reference to the ‘Dunbar number‘ (148), which (amongst other things) is thought to be the average size of a neolithic village. Evolutionary biologists argue that emotions, language and the human brain developed in synch as we progressed from hunter-gatherers to Neolithic farmers and that for villages of more than 150 or so people the human brain just couldn’t handle the complexities of all the relationships.

Social networking isn’t about technology it’s about relationships. Facebook appears to enable networks that are remarkably similar to those studied by evolutionary biologists -- the average size of a Facebook network is 110 with 6.6 ‘close’ friends.  What would you expect the equivalents to be for the online community you are building? Can you measure the degree of connectedness?

2. Collaboration and competition are two faces of the same evolutionary coin

REUTERS/Paulo Santos

Behavioural scientists play a game with different groups to establish how closely they resemble the rational, selfish norm of standard economics. You are given $10 to split with another person. If he or she accepts your split, you each get your part. If he or she rejects your offer, you both get nothing. Theoretically, your partner should accept any split since something is better than nothing. But most offers under $2 are rejected. This result holds true for all sorts of groups of people apart from indigenous and isolated tribes. The model of rational, selfish homo economicus turns out to be a very special case of the human condition.

Some find it hard to understand why people collaborate when they are in competition with one another. But collaboration and competition have always co-existed within our most basic social networks. Neolithic tribe members collaborated in hunting and village activities but competed for influence and partners within those same structures. Our networks define not only zones of influence but also zones of competition.

Most online social networks channel both collaborative and competitive behaviours. Counts of friends or followers and league tables play to the competitive spirits. Easy tools to enable sharing and networking play to the collaborative instincts. Too much emphasis on competition can cause problems (as in the case of Digg). Too little in the way of collaboration risks inaction (arguably LinkedIn’s problem). Facebook has found a reasonable balance.

3. Our friends affect our behaviour directly

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Emotions are contagious: smiling waiters get bigger tips; college students who share with mildly depressed room-mates become progressively more depressed; happier cricket players lead to happier cricket teams, which leads to better performances. And what goes for emotions goes  for almost everything else -- health, wealth, beliefs, relationships.  
 
The human brain appears to be wired not only to mimic but also to internalise emotions. We’re generally very good at empathy. It probably stems from an earlier stage in human development before language. The legacy is that we are extraordinarily influenced by the moods, behaviours and attitudes of those with whom we are in close contact.   

Successful community managers leverage their network centrality to set the tone for their communities and act as role models. Arianna Huffington’s presence on the Huffington Post is a good example of this in action.

4. The power of networks comes not from your friends but their friends (and their friends)

Most people get jobs from second or third degree connections. A Boston study showed that 83% of respondents got jobs through people in their networks they had never met. Something similar happens with long-term relationships -- nearly two-thirds of couples in the Chicago Sex Survey said they’d been introduced by a mutual friend (second degree contacts).

What is more remarkable perhaps is that all of those effects that spread from direct contacts -- emotions, health, wealth, and beliefs, -- also appear to spread from second and third degree contacts. So we are more likely to be happy if those at two or three degrees of separation are happy. And more likely to get divorced if we are connected, even loosely, to those who have been divorced. Similarly for obesity, loneliness and wealth. But studies show there is a dramatic tailing off of these contagion effects at four degrees of separation.

Randomly selected acquaintances (first degree) tend to be well-connected. Using this property, immunisation programmes targeting 30 pct of the population give similar outcomes to those directly targeting 99 pct. To make community management as effective as possible leverage the most connected. Intervene to deal with loneliness and other potentially negative contagions.

5. The structure of networks is critical in determining how information flows

REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

There’s a huge variety of social networks but you can get a fix on how they differ by analysing a limited number of features they all share:

Transitivity measures the degree to which your direct connections are connected with one another. Centrality measures how close you are to the centre of the network -- if you are too peripheral you will not be able to access the information flow. There is a strong tendency for online social networks to suffer from homophily (full of people who are very similar) and polarisation (few links to other groups) with the political blogosphere a classic example of the drawbacks that can arise.

Understand the structure of your network to get the most out of it. Push back to members where they sit within the community to encourage centrality. Make connecting and communicating easy to encourage transitivity.  If necessary, encourage heterogeneity to avoid the pitfalls of homophily and polarisation.

6. There are different kinds of social networkers

Tulane Cancer Center

Studies have shown that people in the centre of networks have a different DNA make-up. The Connected authors identify at least four 'types': co-operators, free-riders, punishers and loners, all of whom have played some critical role in our evolution (though the proportions may have changed radically).

Wikipedia is the prime example of an online network channelling the different motivations of the four types -- the co-operators provide the original content, the punishers and co-operators handle community management, editing and sorting out the miscreants, and the free-riders provide the huge audience and, indirectly, promote the work of the other types..

Work to identify the different 'types' within your community. Find ways of harnessing their different motivations.

7. Social networks have a darker side

REUTERS/Nikola Solic

Social networks tend to magnify whatever they are seeded with, whether it is positive or negative. From runs on banks to the spread of STDs among teens, the notion of contagion runs throughout ‘Connected’. Contagion is a neutral term within social networking theory. But it is commonly understood as a negative. We would rather be on the periphery of a network under attack from flu or subject to systemic financial contagion.

An earlier book -- the Wisdom of Crowds -- identified the conditions under which groups could outperform individuals in solving problems. Social networks can do many things but , by their very nature, their members lack independence and therefore violate one of the key conditions for ‘wisdom’. Similarly, there is a risk of short-sightedness within networks -- the ‘echo chamber’ of the political blogosphere highlights the problems caused by homophily in communities.

Communities need tending.

8. Networks with 'small world' properties tend to outperform

REUTERS/Gary Hershorn

A study of the financial performance of Broadway musicals between 1945 and 1989 showed the  most successful exhibited 'small world' properties -- high transitivity with a combination of people who know one another and have worked well together in the past (good communications via strong ties) and a degree of heterogeneity with new people coming in with new ideas (creativity via weak ties)
 
Too few strong ties limits the flow of information. Too few weak ties blinds you to opportunities with new partners. Do what you can to encourage a balance.

31 Dec 2010

Google and George Clooney Aim Satellites at Sudan, Become "Anti-Genocide Paparazzi" | Fast Company

Garang maousoleum

 

[Image copyright 2010 DigitalGlobe. Produced by UNITAR-UNOSAT]

Most media have focused on the celebrity status of George Clooney and the spooks-style 'eye in the sky' technology of the Satellite Sentinel project for monitoring violence ahead of South Sudan's secession vote on Jan 9. But as anyone involved in satellite surveillance will tell you, ground-level verification is necessary to deal with all the false positives and Fast Company is the only mainstream medium (according to Google News) to report on the involvement of the Ushahidi-based Sudan Vote Monitor, whose work involves crowd-sourcing reports of violence.

UPDATE: See this excellent analysis of the history, philosophy and practice of 'air surveillance' by Patrick Meier, including reference to an existing project -- Amnesty's 'Eyes on Darfur'. 

 

30 Dec 2010

Who’s Using Twitter And How They’re Using It [Infographic]

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Excellent visual summary of Twitter demographics. Striking that US hispanics are almost four times as likely to use Twitter as white non-hispanics.

22 Dec 2010

The Scroogonomics of Holiday Gift Giving [INFOGRAPHIC]

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The main conclusion from this summary --- that most people would be better off spending less on others and more on gifts for themselves -- not only seems to be at odds with the general thrust of behavioural economics but also to have a touch of 'bah humbug' about it.

21 Dec 2010

Web 3.0: The way forward?

Just when you were beginning to get the first inkling of what the Semantic Web (or Web3.0) might be about comes something called The Metaweb (or Web4.0(I suppose).

17 Dec 2010

Just received a beautifully produced but rather chilling Christmas card from @mattbuckhack

There's a Dickensian feel to this, which seems entirely appropriate.

15 Dec 2010

Infographic of the Day: The Facebook Map of the World | Co.Design

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What the world looks like to the Facebook servers. Caught myself wondering why Brazil looked so much less active than India and then remembered that Orkut is the social network of choice there.

8 Dec 2010

Recommended viewing: Taiwan's NMA TV has animated the WikiLeaks/Assange saga

I know I shouldn't but just love this comic book style presentation of news.

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I'm a journalist based in London working for Reuters News. Any opinions expressed here are my own.