Today’s Washington Post has a story, About Facebook! Forward March!, on the many academic researchers who are studying blogs, social networking applications and all forms of social media.

“The race is on — to an extremely obscure wing of the ivory tower. Who will own the study of the social networking sites? Is it computer science or behavioral science? Is it neuropsychology or artificial intelligence? PhDs around the country are trying to figure out, in their esoteric and socially awkward way, how to get in while the getting’s good.”

The story focuses on Dana Boyd as an example of a young researcher who has achieved recognition that is quite remarkable for someone still in graduate school, largely because she was among the first to do good work on a hot new area.

While the article is interesting, it uses the academic politics frame, as in the famous “Academic politics is so bitter because the stakes are so low” bon mot.

“The culture of academia is like a land rush: professors poised around the edges of each new intellectual territory, waving flags emblazoned with theoretical frameworks, making frenzied dashes to stake claim on new topics, ready to shoot trespassers.”

The result, I think, will leave most readers with the impression that studying social media is faddish, self indulgent and without practical application.

The Washington Post has an article, Kremlin Seeks To Extend Its Reach in Cyberspace , on how the Russian government is increasingly using the Web to influence and control public information and opinion.

“After ignoring the Internet for years to focus on controlling traditional media such as television and newspapers, the Kremlin and its allies are turning their attention to cyberspace, which remains a haven for critical reporting and vibrant discussion in Russia’s dwindling public sphere.”

With more than one-third of new Web content now coming from users of social media sites, this effort is focused on blogs, which have been a problem for in the past.

“Some Russian Internet experts say a turning point came in 2004, when blogs and uncensored online publications helped drive a popular uprising in Ukraine after a pro-Moscow candidate was declared the winner of a presidential election.”

But, as we all know, it’s possible for a knowledgeable and active group to have an undue influence in social media systems. An example from the Wapo story is telling.

“On April 14, an opposition movement held a march in central Moscow that drew hundreds of people; police detained at least 170, including the leader of the march, chess star Garry Kasparov. Pavel Danilin, a 30-year-old Putin supporter and blogger whose online icon is the fearsome robot of the “Terminator” movie, works for a political consulting company loyal to the Kremlin. He said he and his team, which included people from a youth movement called the Young Guard, quickly started blogging that day about a smaller, pro-Kremlin march held at the same time. They linked to one another repeatedly and soon, Danilin said, posts about the pro-Kremlin march had crowded out all the items about the opposition march on the Yandex Web portal’s coveted ranking of the top five Russian blog posts. “We played it beautifully,” Danilin said.”

In addition to governments implicit or explicit self-promotion through pushing their message, they can also crack down on voices they do not like.

“Prosecutors have begun to target postings on blogs or Internet chat sites, charging users with slander or extremism after they criticize Putin or other officials. Most such incidents have occurred outside Moscow, and federal officials deny that they signal any broader campaign to control the Internet.”

I am afraid that we will see much more of this from all kinds of governments and also from large and powerful businesses.

Friends of the Ebiquity group and readers of the Ebiquity blog are welcome join the LinkedIn networking group Friends of CSEE@UMBC.

Go to this URL to join the group:
https://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/896/6BE1922AFF24/

What Is LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is an online network of more than 4.2 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 130 industries.

When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your professional accomplishments. Your profile helps you find and be found by former colleagues, clients, and partners. You can add more connections by inviting trusted contacts to join LinkedIn and connect to you.

What Is LinkedIn for Group?

https://www.linkedin.com/static?key=groups_info

We’ve been conducting a pilot study at http://fieldmarking.reger.com/ towards creating a Global Human Sensor Net: people all over the world collaboratively reporting, tagging, and thus exchanging information about their observations of the natural world. Such information is already piling up in casual text in blogs and discussion forums, but it is not very accessible to scientists there.

A variety of efforts are underway to address this general problem of how to share unstructured information: simple tagging, microformats, datablogging, structured blogging, and semantic web browsers.

The FieldMarking concept is to let people freely report what they see in unstructured text, but to provide them with appropriate data fields to structure or annotate their own — or somebody else’s — observations. To use text scrapers and existing ontologies to provide suggestions for appropriate markup. To publish the structured data in RDF so it can be intelligently retrieved and aggregated so that scientists can be alerted, for example, to invasive species or emerging diseases. Interactive graphing tools would allow both citizens and scientists to visually mine the data.

FieldMarking combines observation in the “field” with the idea of filling out data “fields” or creating semantic “markup.”

The current prototype, FieldMarking, uses the datablogging technology at Reger.com. Thus we can take advantage of RSS syndication, mobile posting, and graphable data fields from shared templates. Datablogging also does not require any special plug-ins to be installed by users. Our testing suggests that, in addition to some bugginess in the Reger.com software, this approach has some limitations. We need to be able to apply multiple data records to a text entry, because it often makes sense to report many observations or many kinds of observations in one paragraph. Also, we need to allow data records from other users who may dispute the original markup. Customized log types can be shared with other users of reger.com, but we’ll want to more broadly distribute across multiple platforms.

All the same, the potential is enormous and we will continue to gather pilot data on the kinds of biological information available in these unstructured data sources, the willingness of people to structure it, and the technologies that will make it possible.

To add some justification to my previous post, here’s a good summary of IBM’s adoption of Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web — from the “The Future of Social Networks” event at IBM, Cambridge. Summary of the panel talk and discussion on IBM’s adoption of emerging technologies for the intranet make a useful read.

(via David Weinberger)

The prospect of every licensed vehicle being required to have an active RFID tag raises lots of privacy issues, although in many ways ways we have them already with visual tags and modern image processing. It also opens the door to many new opportunities.

–

Brit License Plates Get Chipped, Mark Beard, Wired News, 9 august 2005

The British government is preparing to test new high-tech license plates containing microchips capable of transmitting unique vehicle identification numbers and other data to readers more than 300 feet away.
…
Proponents argue that making such RFID tags mandatory and ubiquitous is a logical move to counter the threat of terrorists using the roadways, and that it will scoop up insurance and registration scofflaws in the process.
…
The U.K. Department for Transport gave the official go-ahead for the microchipped number plates (as they are called in the United Kingdom) last week, and the trial is expected to begin later this year. The government has been tight-lipped about the details. One of the vendors bidding to participate in the trial said it would start with smartplates added to some police cars.

The point of the test is to see whether microchips will make number plates harder to tamper with and clone, said U.K. Department for Transport spokesman Ian Weller-Skitt. Many commuters use counterfeit plates to avoid the London congestion charge, a fee imposed on passenger vehicles entering central London during busy hours.

MORE (via Bruce Schneier)

The Washington Post has an article on a popular new web diversion — AIMFight — that lets you compare the popularity of two AIM screenames. It feeds off a combination of the importance of social networking and our urge to compete by framing the issue as a one-to-one comparison between the social networks of two individuals. Your AIMFight score is just the “sum of the current number of people online who have you listed as a buddy, out to three degrees”. The metric is simpler than that used by PageRank in that it doesn’t divide a buddy’s contribution to your rank by the by number of other buddies he has. The idea is clever, though, and admits lots of possibilities to explore better algorithms for ranking individuals in social networks. For example, a natural extention would be to integrate information from many social networking systems — AIM, MSN, FOAF, linkedIn, etc. FOAF could be the glue to help do this.

Following up on RSS Readers: Narrowing Down Your Choices and Danny Ayers’s post on blogging hosts — here’s our attempt at ranking blog hosting websites. These statistics are based on Technorati’s index. Software used (MT, WordPress etc.) are not part of the statistic.

Technorati API allows 500 queries per day. We picked query words randomly from an english dictionary. We then collected the top 100 results (most live blogs) between 9:00 AM and 1:00 PM EST over a period of the last 18 days. We eliminated duplicate blog home pages to create a list of 173192 unique blogs.

Note: Technorati ranks results by freshness — our statistics are hence for the “Live Blogosphere”.

We do not claim our statistics to be representative. These are the biases –

1. Technorati index.
2. US Blogs, given our query time-frame.
3. Blogger — spam blogs are very live.
4. Self hosted blogs. Our numbers only use URLs to classify blogs. For instance, a blogger weblog hosted at a personal website is not classified with blogger. Blogger blog’s are identified by “blogspot.com” being part of the URL.

Even with these biases, our numbers should give a good estimate of blogging host popularity.

Based on our collection here’s how blog hosts compare.

Technorati API also provides inlink information of blogs. We normalized inlink for these blog hosts to find the the number of inlinks/blog for each of these hosts. Total inbound links in our collection is 1.8 Million. The mean inlink/blog is 10.64

The impact rating – inlinks/blog

The Rest .. includes many blogs which are self-hosted. Self-hosted blogs, as is evident are the most popular.

Thanks to Jim Mayfield for suggesting the use of technorati.

Trading virtual objects may sound zany, but it seems people can get motivated enough to kill for them, like this tragic incident.

Who owns virtual resources? Can there be rights over objects/artifacts in virtual gaming worlds and for that matter the Internet? Do we own email messages sent or received on Hotmail or Gmail? Is this really different from privacy? Is this DRM?

$9m trade revenues on eBay for such artifacts, gives an idea of the scope of the problem.

Lots of interesting posts on folksonomies in the many2many group blog.

Clay Shirky offers an interesting metaphor for how new ideas and technologies, folksonomies in this case, evolve and are adapted.

To put this metaphorically, we are not driving a car, with gas, brakes, reverse and a lot of choice as to route. We are steering a kayak, pushed rapidly and monotonically down a route determined by the environment. We have a (very small) degree of control over our course in this particular stretch of river, and that control does not extend to being able to reverse, stop, or even significantly alter the direction we’re moving in.

Liz Lawley comments (“it’s the social network, stupid!”) on the need for personalized ranking.

One of the things that I’ve tried to emphasize every time I’ve talked to people involved with search engines is the growing uselessness of ranking algorithms that take the search and linking habits of the whole world into account. I don’t want to know what the average eight-year-old calls an image. I want to know what my friends and colleagues call an image. Or a link. Or a photo.

Flickr and del.icio.us work so well for me not because they aggregate the world’s tags, but because they allow me to aggregate my social network’s tags, links, and photos. I don’t want to see everybody’s links on productivity, but I do want to see Merlin Mann’s. I don’t want to see everybody’s links on blogging, but I do want to see danah’s. I don’t want to see “research” resources from a molecular biologist, but I do want to see them from a sociologist studying online social networks.

How does each of us personalize the ranking algorithms used by information retrieval systems? We can tell Flickr who’s in the group of people whose opinions we value. But do we have to do the same for del.icio.us and technorati and the 87 other sites we visit? An obvious idea is to integrate a trust based approach with a system to aggregate and integrate RDF information on our social network (FOAF) and the objects being searched over. One problem is that the straightforward way to define a ranking algorithm is non-incremental and expensive. Even incremental approximations will be expensive for large collections of things to be ranked. Google can afford to do it for the average web user, but not for each of us. Personalized and topic-based ranking offers many challenges (see An Analytical Comparison of Approaches to Personalizing PageRank for some discussion).

RDF + trust might form the foundation for a good motor for our kayak. We’ll have to see if it’s too big.

BlogShares is a fantasy stock market where weblogs are the companies. Players invest fictional dollars on shares in blogs. Blogs are valued by their incoming links and add value to other blogs by linking to them. Prices can go up or down based on trading and the underlying value of the blog. If your blog is not yet in their database, you can easily add it.

Blogshares is a product of Santa Cruz Tech which also has QuackTrack, billed as the “The world’s largest browsable blog index”. It looks like the two sites are driven off the same database. Another interesting service they have developed is padbot. Send it simple questions by SMS or email and it responds with relevant information.

By the way, we recommend EBB as a strong buy.

Thanksgiving.

No, we’re not talking turkeys but acknowledgements. Lee Giles and friends have been mining (mostly) computer science papers to determine what people and what funding agencies get thanked the most. In an article with Isaac Councill, “Who Gets Acknowledged: Measuring Scientific Contributions through Automatic Acknowledgment Indexing” in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences he described how they automatically extracted the metadata from documents on the web and the various formulae they used for thank ranking.

The most thanked individual? Oliver Danvy of the University of Aarhus. The most thanked organization? NSF or DARPA, depending on the formula used. Eventually the information will appear on CiteSeer, but for now see these news items:

• Nature news: New Method Ranks Impact of Computer and Information Science Funding Agencies, Institutions and Individuals
• Penn State press release: Acknowledgements hit the limelight

Acknowledgement metadata on papers may become another interesting source of social network information.