socialnetworks

A great day by my account at least (and by some others that I overheard!) was had at the WebCamp workshop on social networks held at DERI, NUI Galway yesterday.

Considering the short notice of just nine days, there was an impressive turnout of between 50 and 60 people, and as well as six talks in the morning we had some interesting "birds of a feather" discussion sessions in the afternoon.

I've already blogged about graphical social network visualisations for boards.ie; I'm now adding to my wiki the scripts used to pre-generate the XML for Prefuse graphs of these networks (i.e. user networks of vBulletin mutual buddy links). These are similar to those used to visualise the blogosphere on Planet Journals as well (just using blogroll links instead of buddy links).

http://www.johnbreslin.com/wiki/index.php/VBulletin_Social_Network_Visualisation

The circle of friends graph view on boards.ie appeared today, showing a person's friends and friends of friends (buddies of buddies!) on the site. There are 14201 links from 3810 users to 4533 other users.

Here are a few pictures of the overall network, but since my user ID is the lowest the first one centres around me. Everyone isn't connected; there are some bunches of people (clustered in the top left of the first picture) that aren't interlinked with the rest.

In my NewsTalk 106 interview today, I referenced psychology student Gareth Stack's excellent article on Bebo for tuppenceworth.ie, where he compared the browsing and location of friends on the site to slot machine gambling. I thought it was a great quote, so had to mention it.

Following on from the Sunday Times article about Bebo and various colleges blocking the site, I was interviewed for about 5 minutes by Jack and Ali on Dublin's Spin 1038 at 1:10 PM today.

You can hear the clip from the show here.