In a recent project that I’ve been working on (Twitter SNA focus and I’ll tell you more about this project later), an interesting question came up from the client – “So this group is always retweeting/sharing from this group, so they must know each other and/or be ‘organized’, correct?” Well, not so much and here are some reasons why:

First, we have to get a fundamental understanding of what it means to retweet/reshare/like a message and to keep things simple, we’ll focus on twitter’s social media network.

The traditional view is that you would only retweet messages that you either agree with or support, but that [...]

A few years ago a company named Klout appeared that promised to be able to measure social media influence using what they called the Klout score. Today Klout was bought out by some marketing automation company called Lithium Tech.

When I hear of Klout, I was so surprised that someone had finally and quickly solved the never-ending challenge of measuring and ranking social influence through a mathematical algorithm, so I jumped right into it, created an account and signed up to have my score measured.

Only to find out that the scores were nonsensical, the automated topic-choosing algorithm was a little (or a lot) off and that they still had a long way to go. I [...]

So using the EVE API I downloaded the star system list and their connections from the EVE Online Universe–a favorite time-passing hobby of mine–and ran several network and visualization analysis on the data. I found some interesting results and posted a complete visual which is searchable on my blog for all to see EVE Universe Map Using Network Analysis

One of the interesting things I found is that the CCP Devs used clustering in naming the regions and sectors within EVE based on the number of jumps between groups of systems–a high number of jumps (algorithmically) creates a region. There’s a bunch of other subtle stuff like this which I’ll [...]

When Granovetter came up with his strength of weak ties theory back in 1973, the Internet wasn’t around and Internet technologies such as the semiconductor which was used to build computers were still in their early stages of development and testing.

Back then, relationships had to form face-to-face or through direct referrals that did not involve (digital) electronic methods of communication – in other words they were a little bit harder and more time-consuming to develop. But isn’t that precisely what Granovetter’s strength of weak ties theory was built on: The idea that unique information comes from weak ties (not easily [...]

One of the most important applications of network science is the ability to apply it to organizations-a specialty of mine. A while ago I wrote a (pretty long) white paper to help explain the importance and immense value that organizational network analysis provides to managing change within organizations.

Traditional change management theories’ purpose is to provide sustainable change for organizations that puts them in a better position for some goal like growth, expansion, or creating a better product.

But, once theory is applied to real world situations, it generally fails in being able to accomplish successful and effective [...]

For weeks now we have been watching with awe, and dismay as the National Security Administration (NSA) spying program story unfolds. For scientists and practitioners that work with social and organizational network analysis it is especially important for us to be engaged in this topic and to realize that the methods that we spend an uncounted amount time of our professional and academic lives, studying, developing, promoting and practicing are being used as a weapon to spy on fellow American citizens.

What I’ve done in this post is try to explain how “meta data” analysis works for those who are not in the field. I [...]