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The Manchester social networks group (MSNG) is a cross-disciplinary research group located in the School of Social Sciences. MSNG aims to discuss and to promote the application and development of Social Network Analysis methodology to answer important research questions in social science. The following SNA topics are of interest to the group: Data collection for social network analysis Longitudinal networks and network formation Neighbourhood and network variations in social and health outcomes Qualitative network analysis Social Networks and Social Movements Statistical modelling of social networks Visualising and describing social networks

Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information. It allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web's social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

No, Blab's new platform can't necessarily predict the future. But what the Seattle-based social analytics company did debut today is software that will help brands determine which of the millions of social media conversations they should focus on. Using Blab's patented technology, the company analyzes 50,000 news and social media sources, including more than 60 million posts per day. Blab then organizes that information into a "Conversations Canvas dashboard" and predicts where those conversations may go up to three days in the future based on past data and current social media chatter.

Bennett is a consultant on social capital and networks, and the creator of "The Hands We Shake" lecture series on how to build, grow, and sustain social capital.  He is an expert in networking strategy and social capital retention.  As a trusted adviser, he has helped start-ups, small businesses, non-profits and individuals develop a comprehensive strategy to build and cultivate their social capital.  Bennett advises his clients on how to locate and access social capital within their present networks and create a framework for future network strategy.

For the past year and two I have noticed a lot of statistical analysis using #rstats /R on unstructured text generated in real time by the social network Twitter. From an analytic point of view , Google Plus is an interesting social network , as it is a social network that is new and arrived after the analytic tools are relatively refined. It is thus an interesting use case for evolution of people behavior measured globally AFTER analytic tools in text mining are evolved and we can thus measure how people behave and that behavior varies as the social network and its user interface evolves.

What makes a tweet go viral online? And what does a viral trend actually look like? Those are a couple of the questions that can be answered by a new Microsoft Research project, called Viral Search. The company's researchers are showing the project this week at an internal gathering this week in Redmond. The program crunches large amounts of data from Twitter (and potentially Facebook and other platforms in the future) to analyze and display patterns of distribution on the social network.

One reason I love getting to know social impact entrepreneurs is that they are among the most sincerely passionate folks you'll ever meet.  They're not just enthusiastic and driven. Social impact entrepreneurs care deeply and passionately, about their projects in a very personal way.  And their missions are often so profound and inspiring that I get goose bumps just hearing them talk about it.  Occasionally, I even get a little choked up as I imagine what they want to accomplish and the impact they would have if they were to succeed. I was moved in just this way recently when I met a wickedly smart and infectiously passionate entrepreneur whose simple vision could have profound, life changing impacts for children all over the world.  (Wow… I just got a lump in my throat just thinking about what she wants to accomplish.) Moreover, her idea is not only brilliant and potentially highly impactful - it's also a very simple idea and straightforward to execute on.  That's part of what makes it so brilliant. (Out of respect for confidentiality, I am not disclosing the particular entrepreneur or her mission.  However, she did review this piece prior to posting.) But once I felt that I understood her project (and cleared my throat) I found myself doing what I always seem to do - rooting around for the biggest, hardest problems that will challenge the success of the business. In my view, she had some potentially fatal issues.

Visible is the leader in social media monitoring, analytics, and services for enterprises globally. Visible's award-winning technology and expertise helps businesses analyze social media conversations to better understand consumer preferences, market dynamics, competitive strengths and weaknesses, and other information critical to a company's reputation and brands. Visible is the solution of choice for many Forbes Global 2000 companies in a variety of industries including financial services, pharmaceutical, automotive, consumer products, retail, travel and hospitality, telecom, technology, and agencies.

"Many social entrepreneurs are seeking more individualized support in the form of shared working spaces, incubators and/or accelerators that provide a mix of networking opportunities, events, funding, and mentorship in exchange for a monthly membership fee or equity stake in their company."

You might want to watch the video below before you check in, update your status, or snap and share that photo of you at lunch with your smartphone. The Guardian got hold of this 2010 video demonstration from Raytheon, a big-time contractor that also develops things like missile systems for the Department of Defense, which shows an online tracking tool called Rapid Information Overlay Technology, or RIOT.

NodeXL is an open-source template for Excel 2007 and 2010 which provides the utility to create a hierarchical network edge list. With NodeXL, you can create a customizable hierarchical network graph and zoom, scale, or pan it for a more refined look of added data. Networks can also be imported or exported to a variety of file formats. For example, you can create a graph displaying a company's chain of command and structure of subordinate employees. NodeXL provides the convenience of eluding difficult applications, arcane file formats and programming language for creating such graphs. You can even import a list of your Twitter followers or YouTube and Flickr connections, to create graphs representing your social network.

NodeXL data importer for social networks!

A 50-foot tall statue of Shaquille O'Neal marks the southeast entrance to Beijing's Chaoyang Park. The NBA star clutches a basketball close to his chest and gazes towards the horizon. Nearby are three outdoor basketball courts, where I've scheduled an interview with the head of Greenpeace East Asia's Sustainable Finance Program. Calvin Quek is playing a game of four-on-four when I arrive one morning this past August. Smog blocks the sunshine and makes the air feel thick. If the other players notice, they don't show it. Some smoke cigarettes during the water breaks. "It's hard to say black and white whether [the government] is for or against us," Quek says of Greenpeace, over the sound of bouncing basketballs. Earlier this week, his colleagues had published "Thirsty Coal," a grim critique of China's coal strategy. The government plans to build 16 new coal-fired power bases by 2015 in some of the country's most arid regions. "Left unchecked," reads the English report summary, "these mining projects will only cause more ecological disaster and social unrest in the foreseeable future."

A number of instructors have been using NodeXL to help teaching social network analysis. It is relatively easy to use compared to many other network analysis and visualization tools, while still providing a rich set of metrics and visualization features. It is also free and integrates with Excel 2007, which many users are familiar with. This page is meant to collect information that can be useful in teaching with NodeXL.

Rioting and related intra-crowd dynamics are significant human processes, but we know less about the basic behavioral science and subsequent processes that drive and shape rioting than we would like to. This is due, in large part, to the difficulty in studying riots on the ground and to the sheer complexity of riot phenomena. We know even less about the geographical dynamics of rioting, even though there is a dedicated (but only general) appreciation that geography is important. Existing work has, for the most part, adopted the most straightforward path to discovery, by examining coarse (city-scale) geographies of rioting, or in the few instances where intra-crowd riot dynamics are considered they have focused on stylized abstractions of behavior. Because of the difficulties of using standard social science inquiry to study riots (surveys, ethnographic analysis, interviews), many researchers have turned to computer modeling to create synthetic riots that can be configured, sampled, and experimented with. But, building models of something as bewilderingly complex as rioting is really quite difficult and so many short-cuts are taken. In particular, models are usually cellular-based in form (where rasters represent people and their local environment) and founded on physical interactions between relatively "dumb" particle-people (where continuum mechanics, random walks, or particle-particle forces serve as a substitute for socio-spatial interaction and behavior).

"A Seattle data technology startup is taking the phrase "know your customer" to a whole new level. Versium Analytics today introduced a new analytics platform called LifeData. Led by former InfoSpace executives Chris Matty and Kevin Marcus, the 12-month-old company is trying to help organizations learn more about their customers by using a patent-pending technology that verifies and cross-indexes large sets of data."

Jaron Lanier is a computer science pioneer who has grown gradually disenchanted with the online world since his early days popularizing the idea of virtual reality. "Lanier is often described as 'visionary,' " Jennifer Kahn wrote in a 2011 New Yorker profile, "a word that manages to convey both a capacity for mercurial insight and a lack of practical job skills." Raised mostly in Texas and New Mexico by bohemian parents who'd escaped anti-Semitic violence in Europe, he's been a young disciple of Richard Feynman, an employee at Atari, a scholar at Columbia, a visiting artist at New York University, and a columnist for Discover magazine. He's also a longtime composer and musician, and a collector of antique and archaic instruments, many of them Asian. His book continues his war on digital utopianism and his assertion of humanist and individualistic values in a hive-mind world. But Lanier still sees potential in digital technology: He just wants it reoriented away from its main role so far, which involves "spying" on citizens, creating a winner-take-all society, eroding professions and, in exchange, throwing bonbons to the crowd.

The notion of "externalities" has become familiar in environmental circles. It refers to costs imposed by businesses that are not paid for by those businesses. For instance, industrial processes can put pollutants in the air that increase public health costs, but the public, not the polluting businesses, picks up the tab. In this way, businesses privatize profits and publicize costs. While the notion is incredibly useful, especially in folding ecological concerns into economics, I've always had my reservations about it. Environmentalists these days love speaking in the language of economics - it makes them sound Serious - but I worry that wrapping this notion in a bloodless technical term tends to have a narcotizing effect. It brings to mind incrementalism: boost a few taxes here, tighten a regulation there, and the industrial juggernaut can keep right on chugging. However, if we take the idea seriously, not just as an accounting phenomenon but as a deep description of current human practices, its implications are positively revolutionary.

"In a post-fact era, you can be an elected official and have a remarkably flexible relationship with the truth. Take climate science: more than 97% of scientists agree that climate change is a man-made phenomenon, but conservative politicians--and more than 65% of Republicans in Congress--outdo one another to demonstrate just how little they believe in science."

Working with network data