Category: Social Networks

Fun with Wikipedia Networks

Kyle 1 Comment

So the mouse-over text of today’s xkcd (“Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at ‘Philosophy.'”) has inspired a little playful procrastination. I’d love to put together one of those fun xkcd-style info graphics (the ones with results of interesting little Internet experiments, e.g. “Numbers,” “Regrets,” “Dangers,” etc.) with the results of some collective poking around. Data so far (from myself, Katy “Southside” Huff, Matt Waldron, and Eric “Wolfman” Howell):

“xkcd”: 19 clicks
“Kadevu”: 21 clicks
“Walker Percy”: 27 clicks
“Kevin Bacon”: 13 clicks
“Wisconsin Badgers”: 27 clicks

Also, can someone who knows more about graph theory than I do give us some vocabulary to flesh out the kinds of data we can gather (or wish we could gather)? For instance, Matt Waldron asks via Twitter “I wonder what the longest non-loop answer is (i.e. was the furthest ‘point’ from Philosophy)?” His point about loops (graph theory: “cycles”) is an interesting one. Has anyone found a cycle yet? I thought I had one in the Percy chain, but it turns out there are separate articles for “Meaning (philosophy of language)” and “Meaning (linguistic).” (This is one of those moments where I wish I were a better programmer and could just start writing code to explore all these questions. I’d also need to not be on the clock with someone else’s money, which may actually be all that is stopping me.)

Anyway, if you’re looking for a few minutes off from whatever you doing (I myself am determined to finish my Walker Percy paper for the upcoming Christian Scholars Conference), please consider checking out a few articles’ paths to “Philosophy” and report back!

News: Local and Blocal

Kyle

Happy Saturday. I’m sitting in my pajamas listening to Michael Pollan on a “special encore edition” of Whad’ya Know and catching up on my online life.

First off, special encore editions can only mean it’s fund drive time at Wisconsin Public Radio. Fund drive time is many people I talk to’s reason for not listening to public radio. But, to borrow a phrase Michael Pollan just used (I’ve done that before), I don’t think that argument “passes the 60 Minutes test”; the lack of commercials and overall non-inanity of the programming the rest of the time more than compensates. So let’s all sign-up and pledge, especially in light of the now seemingly annual budget cuts (little shout out there to my old hometown newspaper, which just happened to have the first Google News hit on the subject). And if you take your public radio station for granted, don’t forget about Milwaukee’s formerly great Jazz 89 (RIP).

On a much more uplifting note, it’s International Writing Centers Week, and the UW-Madison Writing Center is celebrating. Among the events I’d heartily recommend are the Podcast Premiere (I heard some early drafts and think they’re going to be great), the Madison-Area Writing Center Colloquium video conference with Nancy Grimm (I’ll be there), and the Writing Fellows Program info session (I’m bummed I’m no longer a Fellow, since the stipend just increased like 400 bucks per semester). If you’re at UW-Madison and have never been to the Writing Center, you’re missing out. I’ve never been part of a more supportive-yet-scholarly community. At the very least, check out the event’s Web page (much to my chagrin, you might spy a picture of me with my old fellow Fellow Shivani).

To zoom in still further to this very URL, I wanted to update you on a few CSC developments. I pushed my web-language abilities to the limit the other day and pieced together (with some help) the code to get the sharing icons you see below each post added to my blog template in a format that hopefully isn’t too obnoxious. Please share any posts you find useful or interesting!

I’ve also, after reading my advisor’s comment on my “News Dump” post, joined del.icio.us and thus exited the dark ages of news sharing (where you just email articles to yourself and blog about them). You can see my del.icio.us tagroll at right, which includes the tag “ToBlog.” That’s where you’ll see the stories I’m thinking of blogging about. Don’t be surprised if the unblogged divergence through this node is pretty high, though; it’s easy to feel ambitious about what I’ll write about when I read the news in the morning but less so when I sit down to blog at night.

Finally, a couple of brief commercial-ish announcements for friends of mine:

(1) David Meerman Scott just announced a “free virtual book tour teleseminar” to promote his new e-book The New Rules of Viral Marketing (with editing by yours truly). It’ll take place Tuesday, Feb. 26 at 5 p.m. eastern, and I highly recommend you join David if you’re interested in learning about how to spread your ideas online. If you are but can’t make it, you should at least join the 42,810 readers who have already downloaded David’s e-book.

(2) My former Wisconsin Engineer partner-in-crime Marty Grasse, who has joined the throng of my friends who have up and moved to the Twin Cities, will be in town Monday and Tuesday to present with his design team at the College of Engineering’s Innovation Days. Stop by and hear about his and the other teams’ inventions. I’ll be there sometime between noon and three.

Update: Marty’s team took home first place in the (lucrative) Schoofs Prize for Creativity competition.

Balancing Act, Part II: Scott, Free

Kyle 2 Comments

I mentioned in my last post that the timing of the launch of this blog was no mere coincidence. Indeed, I don’t think I could have started one at any other time than during a holiday’s week away from the place where I practically live.

But the other motivator was that over the break I thought a lot about blogs, thanks to my friend David Meerman Scott. I connected with David back when I was interim copy editor over at EContent. He offered me some editing work on early drafts of his book The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly. The book became a best-seller and made BNET’s list of 10 Underrated Business Books. It was my first crack at any book-length editing, and I had a really great time working on it.

Since then I’ve been fortunate to work with David on a couple other projects, one of which was released yesterday. You can download his new e-book, The New Rules of Viral Marketing: How word-of-mouse spreads your ideas for free, from his blog Web Ink Now. And as you’d certainly guess if you’re familiar with his ideas, it’s available for free.

What I appreciate most about David’s work is the way he teaches with analogies (a subject I’ve written on a bit myself). My favorite is his simple admonition against creating content the consumer has no interest in: “Think like a publisher.” That’s wise counsel, and it’s an analogy rich with plenty of takeaway examples. (It also reminds me of the advice we give engineering students in writing classes about the similarities between the writing process and the design process.)

Anyway, his most recent analogy is that those keen to harness the power of viral marketing would do well to “think like a venture capitalist.” The research university is increasingly spinoff-centric, so David’s comparison of the success rates of startup companies to those of viral marketing campaigns immediately resonated with my otherwise not-at-all business-savvy mind (I’ve spent some time on the receiving end of the laughably one-way PR pitch “cycle” [David describes it as “begging the media to write about you”], but I knew absolutely nothing about marketing before I started working with him).

Anyway, you can’t work with David for long and not see the value of having a blog. Even if you don’t draw huge numbers (I don’t) and can’t post every day (I can’t), David reminds you that everyone benefits from having a forum for bouncing ideas off a few friends, colleagues, or total strangers.

CSC is now such a forum for me, and it probably wouldn’t exist but for the spark David’s books lit in my head. Whatever your business, some of strategies he suggests should probably be part of your stock-in-trade.

Point of Contention

Kyle

Is The Tipping Point‘s central tenet–that “‘social epidemics’ are ‘driven by the efforts of a handful of exceptional people'”–correct? Some networks theorists writing in Journal of Consumer Research don’t think so.

I won’t start my “Network Flows” class until the end of the month, but I think these guys’ central point makes sense:

Dodds compares the spread of ideas to the spread of a forest fire. When a fire turns into a conflagration, no one says that it was because the spark that began it was so potent. ‘If it had been raining,’ Dodds says, ‘that same match wouldn’t have had an effect.’ Instead, a fire takes off because of the properties of the larger forest environment: the dryness, the density, the wind, the temperature.

In other words, they’re claiming that it’s better to find a way to reach “a critical mass of easily influenced individuals” rather than a few “exceptional people”.

This is disappointing news, if you ask me. I’d rather hear about trends from well spoken experts than a gang of easily influenced chumps.

In other news, it turns out I’m not the only one who watches video on his lunch break. Then again, I’m in grad school, so I do plenty of non-lunch-hour video watching as well. You try sitting at a desk 12-14 hours a day debugging code without a few Power Thirst breaks. Unacceptable!