Think Networks

They live online. They buy online. They play online. Their power is growing

Business Week, December 12, 2005 Cover Story.

The internet and email aid users in maintaining their social networks and provide pathways to help when people face big decisions

Pew Internet & American Life Project Report: The Strength of Internet Ties

Networks and Behavior

… a hands-on workshop was held for researchers who are working with the SIENA (Simulation Investigation for Empirical Network Analysis) program for the statistical analysis of network dynamics for complete networks; as well as for those who have data available and wish to start working with SIENA.

Integrated Web Design: Social Networking — The Relationship between Humans and Computers is Coming of Age

http://www.netvis.org/

FOAF is a way to describe people and relationships to computers. FOAF stands for Friend Of A Friend. FAQ.

At present the simplest way to create your first FOAF file is to visit either the FOAF-a-Matic or [WWW]FoaF Creator and fill out the forms provided. Both tools will generate a basic description for you that covers the most commonly used FOAF data items, i.e. who you are and who your friends are. ([WWW]FOAF-a-Matic uses JavaScript and HTML, whilst [WWW]FoaF Creator uses XForms.)

Once you make the document, copy the generated FOAF description from the text box above and paste it into a file. Put the file onto your website somewhere where it’s publically accessible, it’s a good idea to name this file “foaf.rdf” as then a google search can be used to help discover FOAF files across the web.

Noshir knows Christian as a colleague and has met him…
Christian

Noshir knows Sid as a student and has met him…
Sid

XFN allows bloggers to do the Facebook style “how do you know X?” attribute while linking to the person.

The code to type is
a href=”http://jane-blog.example.org/” rel=”sweetheart date met” Jane /a

XFN outlines the relationships between individuals by defining a small set of values that describe personal relationships. In HTML and XHTML documents, these are given as values for the rel attribute on a hyperlink. XFN allows authors to indicate which of the weblogs they read belong to friends, whom they’ve physically met, and other personal relationships. Using XFN values, which can be listed in any order, people can humanize their blogrolls and links pages, both of which have become a common feature of weblogs.

It is also the hope of the authors that this practice becomes widespread enough to allow the creation of a service that charts personal (as opposed to purely mechanical) links between weblogs and the people responsible for them.

It seems that XFN does not do anything on its own. Instead, it will allow some spidering software to collect all this information and develop a social network by parsing the rel information from the links. See doc.

The spidering software that seems to be doing this right now needs to see that the page is XFN friendly. There’s a tag as well.
See here.

WP supports XFN.

Indusscitech

Portal to Science and Technology News from India. Maintained by Professor Pai, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

SNAC - Social Networks and Cyberinfrastructure

The Role of Social Network Research in Enabling Cyberinfrastructure
and the Role of Cyberinfrastructure in Enabling Social Network Research

Nov. 3-5, 2005
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
1205 W. Clark St.
Urbana, Illinois 61801