Millions of users leave digital traces of their activities, interactions and whereabouts on the world wide web. More and more personal conversations and private messages are being shifted to these on-the-move channels of communication despite the many metadata strings attached. In recent years, the social science aspects of this data has become increasingly interesting for researchers.
Social networking services like Foursquare or Twitter provide programming interfaces for direct access to the real time data stream promoting it as free and public data. Despite signing acceptance of public rights these services have in their usage a predominantly private feel to it, creating for the user an ambivalence between voyeurism and exhibitionism.
What is the position of academic research upon using these datasources and datasets and how can academic standards be extended to cover these new and very dynamic in time and space operating information streams whilst protecting individual users privacy and respecting a high ethical standard?
In this presentation the use of digital social networks data will be discussed both from a user and from a processing for research standpoint. Examples of data mining and visualisation will be explained in detail developing a framework for working standards.
This talk will be presented at the lunchtime seminar at CRASSH, University of Cambridge, today 2012-03-14, 12h00-14h00, Seminar Room 1, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road. The second speaker is Dr Sharath Srinivasan (Centre of Governance and Human Rights, POLIS).
The professional version of facebook has now als reached the 100 million user mark and is still growing. LinkedIN the social networking platform for the professional world has published at the beginning of March 2011 their growth in numbers to make a good impression. Founded in 2003 in Santa Monica, California by Reid Hoffman, Allen Blue, Konstantin Guericke, Eric Ly and Jean-Luc Vaillant, the platform has grown to be worth almost $ 3 billion and makes a revenue of over $ 160 million, this is up over 200% from the previous year 2009 at just over $ 80 million.
It was a niche market back the and probably still is. But once your big things settle and a niche can be good business. The main asset linkedIN really has is the content. All these details of businesses, jobs and positions as well as the real people behind it. They say that 73 of the Forbes 100 best companies are using linkedIN hiring systems. This means that the platform hosts a massive amount of details and hors unimaginable stock of knowledge on the worlds markets. These days knowing about the business connections is worth more than actually making business.
Regarding the numbers, there is one more number of the financial sector that is probably interesting. LinkedIN earns about $160 million, but its expenses are almost $150 million. It’s actually expensive to know all these details. Presumably most of the cost goes into infrastructure.
In terms of the demographics, LinkedIN hosts over 58% male profiles and only about 42% female profiles. The main user group is between 25 and 50 years old, but the group of 18-25 year olds are also quite keen on the service with over 20%.
In terms of geographical distribution, as you would expect North America is LinkedIN homeland. with about 48% of all the users. The classic blindspots on the map are Africa, South America (except Brasil and Argentina), the Middle East and the Far East (except India). In terms of geographical gender distribution North America is doing better in terms of equality than every body else with 45% f and 55% m, where the Middle East with 23% f and 77% m is the most unbalanced market. However this is presumably not taking the numbers of users into account.
Through out the network the larger companies, over 1000 employees, are the most common. Also Smaller businesses tend to like the service, where medium sized businesses seem to be not that interested. As you would expect the leading branches are hightech 16% and finances 13% with agriculture covering the end with only about 0.4%. In terms of the job function academics are floating towards the top with around 10%, only the sales department is larger with 13%.
Interesting are aso the facts around the use and growth numbers. In terms of time of the day apparently there is a very high after lunch peak over all. During lunch and after lunch really seems to be the time web users find time for the sneaky break to check their social networking status, read a few blos and apply for a better job on inked in. The graph below also incudes the mobile user times and interestingly they mainly access the service after work and in the evening. However I imagine the graph to be slightly out of scale, the mobile users would be a lot smaller in numbers than the actual web users, but never mind. So if you really want this job you better apply before lunch.
Image taken from mashable.com / The linkedIN network by numbers compiled by xxxxx on 2011-03-22.
Turning lifeless objects into tweeting, talking nodes of interaction is the new internet promis. A sweet thing to do, and probably not that far of. It is definitely not new and the importance of everyday object we surround us with has long been neglected.
It is definitely one of the ver important sources of identity and the creation of self. This is in how we can reflect upon these aids of persona, but also in the way this collection of things portraits us to the outside world. This creation of identity involves memories, conception, but also peer group and cultural values.
What you have and what you do represents your persona in the context and places one in the right spot on the picture, towards friends and family, neighbours and business partner, or strangers.
Image taken from leetneet / One of the Kanojos, Girlfriends at BarcodeKanojo.
So why not project some personality into these objects and treat them nicely. This is what Barcode KANOJO has institutionalised as a barcode hunting game, were every barcode turns into a sweet manga girl an could be your girlfriend.
This is unless she is already someone else’s girlfriend. To snatch her requires quite a bit of stamina, you have got enough to start, but be advised to use it wisely. The Internet of Things is about as unforgiving a the rest of your social landscape, including any other networking media. But never mind you can always just make friends with the manga on your screen.
Any barcode can be scanned and will be interpreted via the camera of our smart phone, the iPhone app can be downloaded HERE. How to play can be found HERE.
at the time of writing the scans today have been at 1,689, the total number of Kanojos generated was at 1,021,672 and the total number of scanned barcodes using this app was at 1,769,288. Its not such a small niche thing after all.
The developer describe the game as: “The Barcode KANOJO brings you a new encounter with virtual girlfriends called ‘KANOJO’ on your iPhone. To find her, you just need to scan the barcode attached to any kinds of goods using your iPhone.
Once you have your own KANOJO, you can take care of her to increase her love, find another KANOJO, or steal a new one from other users.”
Of course there are very close similarities to earlier 80is games such as Barcode Battler for example, but I guess back then guys were heros and monster killers, today they are softies and girlfriend snatchers.
The developer claim there are 7 trillion possible combinations of female to create. Not only that, but depending on where in the world you are, the girls appearance should be more ‘traditional’ to your area.
I guess its the Internet of Things going bonkers, but never mind people seem to like creating a mental projection of their objects they interact with frequently.
Image taken from japanator / Guess this would be a good barcode to start scanning for girlfriends. App is downloaded HERE. But then you might want to try and start with a more unusual barcode for a less stamina intensive start.
“While this barcode may be but a dry symbol, beyond it lies another world.”
This Wednesday at the Building Centre in London was the big BE2 show up with awards of course. In sixteen categories 64 projects, teams and individuals were nominated. Awards are numerous and everywhere they are won or lost, but BE2 promisses to be more than that. The BE2Awards grew out of the BE2Camp a plat form to promote web 2.0 applications in the context of the built environment, eg for planners and developers. A number of camps too place since 2008. Now the Awards area logical next step. “It’s now time to start shouting about some of the best practice that has emerged. It’s time for the world’s first awards for social media in the built environment.”
Image taken from ecologiqyest blog / In order to store and track the stories behind the objects, as well as connect people with similar experiences, Tales of Things launched a website that assists those trying to sell their second-hands on ebay or other e-commerce sites by allowing the media-link through QR from their beta site.
The structure for the awards was: “the Be2 award nominations were sourced from you, our “crowd”, and voted upon by the same “crowd”: you. This helped ensure we got a wide spread of nominations, and also encouraged shortlisted candidates to mobilise their supporters once online voting began.” In this sense it was also a test for BE2 on how good they are able to mobilise the crowd to actually make this work. And it worked out for both the nominations and the voting.
Image taken from Marko Manriquez / This is my first attempt to visualize a data feed from Pachube (energy consumption in this case) using an augmented reality app. The app in question is Porthole, powered by Pachube, a cool and easy to use augmented reality (AR) application that provides a view into the data environments hosted by Pachube. Pachube itself is a vast data brokerage platform for the internet of things, managing millions of datapoints per day from thousands of individuals. Its created by Usman Haque who designs interactive architecture systems and researches how people relate to each other and their spaces.
The winner were announce on the 9th of February and were voted for on the website. In total some 40’000 vote came in to support the contestants. The full list of winners:
Joe Peach won two awards for him self as a blogger in the category best blogger and another one for best blog for This Big City. A blog on everything urban and sustainable covering stories around the planet.
In the category Best ‘Internet of Things’ application the Tales of Things project developed at CASA was the winner. The team with Andrew Hudson-Smith from digitalUrban, Ralph Bartel and Martin de Jode developed it here at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis together with Brunel University, Edinburgh College of Art, University College London, University of Dundee, University of Salford for the past two years. Its great to see this now winning the first award. This category is definitely going to see many more applications to come in the near future. ALready there was stiff competition in this category with patchub, bubblino and sen.se.
Image taken from fazeleyevents / He watches twitter for a chosen keyword and every time he finds a new mention then he blows bubbles.
This is about the blog. There will be some info at some point. Not that anyone is going to read it anyhow , but still it would be nice to have some kind of short on what to find here. – more
